Whispers
by Kolostramin Indincranin
Summary: Uncertain even of his sanity, Isaac Clarke returns to the Ishimura to find it a changed place. And he is no longer alone. What lies in those halls began in terror and death and now continues, into dead space again, where lies the strangest thing: hope.
1. Sorry for Everything

Disclaimer: I own nothing of this that I write of here. I make no excuses for the liberties I take other than that they are my preference and what would fit within the admittedly limited storyline.

1

Sorry for Everything

_We are the burden that we carry_

_From here to there to here._

--The Book of Counted Sorrows

_In space, no one can hear you scream._

--tagline from a forgotten film

((A))

I feel a million years old.

I stand, surrounded by steel-frame bunks, in the officers quarters of the executive shuttle _Harmina_. Beyond the viewport the stars are cold and still, roaring balls of fusion, some by now flared into brief glory as supernovas…others already gone, though no one will even know for millions of years.

The ship is clean. I've hunted through every compartment, under every bench, inside what wall spaces I could access. I've taken the commode off its mounts and stared down at the steel sphincter that seals the waste storage compartment.

I still feel someone's watching me. That one brief moment, that instant of…insanity, when I looked over and saw her, dead…

I'm at least partially insane. I know the textbook definition. In the last twelve hours I've been through enough stress to crack anyone, and I've never considered myself particularly strong in the mental department. Just the intellectual.

I don't know whether I would be better off if I were truly alone onboard. Nicole is still with me. I can remember every move she made, every intonation of every word, that familiar sad look in her eyes…

I think Nicole is dead. I've seen the video…again…over. But I'm no physician. At the moment I wish I were, because Kendra probably doesn't have much longer.

I'm still not sure why I spent those few moments to get her onboard. She felt like a bag of goo and sounded like one when I put her down. Besides the basics, there's not much more I can do for her, and she needs a lot more. Immediate surgery, more like, which is part of why I'm standing here, trying to get my courage up to go in and face her…and see if she's still breathing.

It's something like an engineering problem, actually. I know how things can break, and what sort of things can be used to fix them if they break. Machines, that is. Human bodies…that's another thing entirely.

There's a pretty comprehensive autodoc onboard—at least, for an executive shuttle. It's told me that Kendra took enough damage in those seconds to kill her pretty much instantly. Fractured skull, fourteen shattered ribs, breaks in appendages too numerous to mention, a partially severed right arm, a collapsed lung…

She's still breathing with the other one, at least. The autodoc's slowed the bleeding, but there's only so much a machine can do. Thank god her RIG saved her spinal column. What I really need is a permanent stasis unit to keep her alive until we can get back to…to wherever it is we're going.

Which is nowhere, right now. Another sign of my insanity, I guess. Any normal person would be hell-bent, running tail high for Earth or some other colony world, where there's green grass and air and sky that's blue and not black all the time…where stepping outside doesn't mean suffocation and death from overheating.

Not sure why I'm hesitating. Little enough time as is. I step away from the viewport, flicking my eyes toward the doorway, half expecting to see a lurking creature there, poised with bladed arms to skewer me…

There's no one there.

I step out, into the cramped corridor, and across into the medical bay.

Kendra's v/s: pulse 186, blood pressure 40/20. I'm amazed that tentacle-thing didn't simply crush her heart, but there it is still pumping away.

It's a little hard to look at her. I've seen plenty of dead…people over the last little bit, but not many of them were this badly hurt…and still alive.

The dispenser to my right hums and clicks, and slides out a pair of non-latex, hypoallergenic surgical gloves. As I pull them on, I think…try to think…_just another engineering problem. A to B to C, back to B if C doesn't work..._

On the upside, she's still alive when I finish. Thank god for the autodoc. Truth, if I were ever hurt this badly, I'd rather be shot than live.

But I'm not going to give Kendra that choice. She'll live, dammit, and she's going to answer me for just why she tried to do what she did. Part of me hates her. Part of me wants to make her hurt for what she did.

But, truth as well, I didn't much care for Kynes, M.D. I didn't know him long enough, whereas Kendra…

Anyone who spends hours guiding you through corridors and cargo bays infested with what look like the refugees from hell deserves at least a little consideration, even if she left me to die. Doesn't mean I will.

See? I'm insane. Another perfect example.

On the downside, she's still a mess. The autodoc doesn't have the capabilities to deal with stuff like this.

The _Ishimura _does, though.

The thought pops into my mind, at once terrifying and alluring. At the same time, something else tickles my brain. RIG…Kendra's rig kept her from permanent paralysis, bracing her spine and taking a lot of the impact from that tentacle. Why's that so important?

I make my way forward and settle into the pilot's seat with a glance to my right. No lurking things there.

Then I look back. Still nothing.

I bring up the _Harmina's_ ship-to-mothership com system and tap into the _Ishimura_. It asks me for ident and I key in a standard CEC maintenance code.

A glance to the right. Behind me. Still nothing. The hairs at the back of my neck are standing straight up. Out the main viewport, Aegis shows as a fractured sphere with a massive hole blown into the northern hemisphere. I'm surprised pieces of the planet aren't flying all over the system by now.

_//Personnel logs, location/time:_

_Ident_? The computer asks. This time I key in a slightly more guarded CEC maintenance password. The screen clears.

_Crew member name:_

_//Brennan, Nicole, M.D._

The com system chatters with the _Ishimura_ for awhile. I sit back in my chair and rub at my eyes. I look over at the copilot's seat, then twist and look behind it.

Hope and fear seem to be running rampant all over this system.

_Brennan, Nicole_, says the holo screen before me. _M.D., Ph.D. Chief Medical Officer._

_Status: unknown._

I blink. In all my time dealing with tech, I've never seen a computer show an _unknown_ status. It runs along a scale from healthy and living to dead, and various states in between, but any comp properly synched with a RIG is always accurate. RIGs don't often fail…unless they take a hit like Kendra's.

_//Location, RIG_

The screen blurs, then focuses

_Crew Quarters, Sleeping Bunks B, Crew Deck._

I think I glared at the screen for awhile. I don't know how long I did that for. When I look away, the seat to my right is still empty. No one else around. Kendra definitely isn't getting up.

The crew quarters? That means that Nicole's RIG is in the crew quarters. The rest of her might be somewhere else…but then the comp would have told me she was _disconnected,_ or something similar.

Crew quarters. My god. Not dead and lunging at me, not down on Aegis, now a fractured ball of rock, turned into light. Somewhere on the _Ishimura_ after all…

Back on that ship.

In the crew quarters, there's probably Nicole's RIG, with part of her spine still attached to it, sending conflicting reports to the ship's computer and out to me, and Nicole is dead or…or wandering around somewhere onboard, drooling, bleeding, and lashing out at everything that comes near.

But that doesn't make any sense. She's dead…I saw her do it, wherever she was. It wasn't saline she'd put into her arm, and even if it was just some ancient drug—diazepam, or the like—that was still enough to kill her.

_Why, Nicole? For Unitology? For that bunch of fucked up freaks? For Mercer, who wanted to bring these things back to Earth? For what?_

I've found I can't close my eyes anymore. They just won't shut but for quick, flashing blinks. Learned reflex by now, I guess. Can't relax…sure as hell can't sleep. I probably won't sleep unless I lock myself in a 6x2x2 box with multiple locks and steel walls…and light all over the place so I can see I'm alone in there.

I shake my head. Off the subject, off the subject. I'm doing that too much now. No sleep, no stimulants, nothing to keep me sharp. I'm dulling down, like a used drill bit. I was thinking about Nicole…

What if she is alive? She's probably not…_what the hell, Isaac, she isn't?_...but if she _is_…

If she _is…_even if she's one of those things…there's got to be something I can do, or earth scientists can do, to help her.

If I ever get back to Earth, that is.

Too much stuff. Too much that doesn't make sense. I still haven't figured out who it was who guided me through the mining deck, or who it was who got onboard with me on the _Ishimura,_ went down to the planet with me and then vanished. Nicole? Another hallucination? And if I _was_ just hallucinating her over there, behind the seat, then who unlocked the cabin door when Kendra had locked it? I didn't, I know that.

There's another reason I can't even close my eyes. Nowhere's safe. It hasn't been since the _Kellion_ crashed.

Does it even have to make sense now, though? Nicole's RIG is in Crew Quarters. Even if it isn't on her anymore…it's something. It's very hard to get a RIG off without someone taking it off willingly.

Or maybe I'm crazy. Maybe Nicole's dead, and I misread the status into something interesting because I don't want her to be dead. I look back at the holographic screen, more carefully this time

_Status: unknown_

_//Location, RIG_

_Crew Quarters, Sleeping Bunks B, Crew Deck._

Until I see another glimpse of that damned ghoul Nicole, I'll trust my eyes, thanks.

But first…probably something I should have done immediately after I lifted off. Even if I'm just hallucinating, I'll probably die somehow out here. I'm getting weirder every minute I stay awake.

I sync my RIG into the shuttle's system and dump all of my video log of the past twelve hours into it, from my waking up two hours out from the _Ishimura_ on the _Kellion_ to now. Saved, copied, and saved again.

Then I sit and think for awhile, about what the hell I'm doing.

I really am insane. It's kind of funny, really. The more I think about it, the funnier it gets, the more…

I start laughing. It's ugly. It sounds like one of those witch cackles from 19th-20th century mechanized Hollowseve toys. Damned waste of space, those things were.

Then I cut off and swing toward the door to the corridor. A sound out there, maybe—dry scratching. My cutter hangs from a strap on my tool belt—an anachronism, as it's partly real leather and only mostly steel. I snatch it up and step up to the doorway.

It's brightly lit, and empty.

I back slowly away from it, until my back hits the pilot's chair. Then I reach behind me with one hand and start shutting the shuttle's doors. Lavatory, med bay, crew and officer's quarters, briefing room/mess hall. I seal each section off from the others, then open only the med bay and return to the doorway. It's still empty, and the corridor beyond.

I step out, left and right, and go to the med bay. Kendra's still there, breathing if anything a bit easier. No one else.

I go over the whole ship again, down to the cabinets underneath the sink in the officer's quarters. Nothing. I feel like something's crawling around wherever I'm not looking, going here and leaving just when I step in. The whole ship is lit up, every room. I go back to the bridge and shut all the doors again.

Then I sit down, and look over at the space between the copilot's chair and the wall.

Nothing there.

I punch up the video logs and open a new one. The 1mm camera swings to follow me. I stare down at it.

"This is Engineer First Class Isaac Clarke, formerly of the _Kellion_, dispatched on a deep-space mission to restore communications to the mining ship _Ishimura._ I am making this report…" I glance over at the empty seat, then at the chronometer on my suit. "…nine hours and forty two minutes after our arrival on the _Ishimura_ and several hours after our departure. The video logs with this message catalogue everything up to this moment. I am now on the _Ishimura's_ executive shuttle, on the bridge. Computer Specialist Kendra Daniels is the only other survivor, and she is seriously injured."

For the first time in what seems forever, I feel my eyelids drooping. Not a good sign. I need stims, or that old fallback, coffee. But first, to finish this. My voice doesn't sound as rusty and disused as I feel it should be. I haven't talked to someone in…

An hour. Less than an hour, actually, since I brought the _Harmina_ into a geostationary orbit close enough to the _Ishimura _to see it…but not close enough to collect any unwelcome guests.

I clear my throat and continue. It's insanely funny for another minute, me sitting here, being all solemn, with a half-dead person in the med bay and half a thousand half-living creatures off in that ship over there, and I'm talking as if it's my last will and testament.

Well, maybe it is. After all, I was crazy enough to save Kendra's life even after she left me to die, and I'm definitely crazy to even consider…what I'm considering.

"I'm making this video log in case my body isn't found and no one knows what happened. You'll have found this shuttle in orbit around the remains of Aegis VII—that is, unless I actually survive and bring it back to people. I'm planning on returning to the _Ishimura_, to get aid for Specialist Kendra Daniels and search for Chief Medical Officer Nicole Brennan. Her RIG shows her as being in the Crew Quarters. As soon as I'm aboard I'll send this shuttle back out, maybe with Kendra onboard, and only bring it back in when I'm done. That way there'll at least be a record."

I pause, staring out at space. I'm not a poet, but at that moment it looked like the mouth of hell.

"If I didn't come back from that ship, do us all a favor and nuke that damned thing. If anyone is left alive onboard…they'll probably consider it a blessing. Clarke out."

With that I save the file, stand, and go down to get some coffee from the officer's quarters. Then I come back, set the cup down, and plot in a course for the Executive Shuttle dock of the _USG Ishimura_.

Part of me feels like a man whose been given a pardon turning around and walking right back to the electric chair, willingly.

But part of me is feeling a really weird thing: hope.

((A))

A/S: I realize it's unfinished. I finished the game itself yesterday morning, and frankly hated it. Thus, creative license and a chance to let myself sleep at night…seriously, I think I get too involved with the characters in these damned games…

And writing this at 11 p.m. definitely isn't helping my state of mind. Ta ta.

K. Stramin


	2. Knowing Fear

2

Knowing Fear

Hope. It's probably bullshit. I hoped a little, near the beginning, that something good might come out of all of this.

Seeing Hammond splattered all over a wall put a dent in that. Watching the entirety of Nicole's video the first time pretty much wiped it out.

And it doesn't help that I still need sleep…a lot.

In the pilot's seat of the _Harmina_, I can't hear the engines. They're far back. There's no sound but the softest of hums from the electronics. Not enough to keep me awake.

So I gulp coffee, drop the cup, stand, and go down to the med bay.

Kendra looks no better. She's actually stopped bleeding so much—tourniquets do wonders so long as you don't tie them around people's necks, and for her legs and right arm, at least, they aren't going to hurt anything anymore than it already is.

I shake my head. White fog has crept up around the corners in the last ten minutes. I walk, carefully, over to the autodoc and dial in a request for a stimulant. It asks me a lot of complex questions, which probably wouldn't be a lot or complex if I were really awake, and then the autodoc clicks and dispenses a degrading plastic wrapper with two white pills half the size of my pinkie. The screen reads _methylphenidate (ER), 20mg_

I pop the pills in my mouth and dry swallow, then go back to the pilot's chair. I pull my helmet on and seal it, then lie back. Pills take awhile.

Thank god for the autodoc, I think, as the world seems to fade away.

The hatch of the _Harmina_ hisses open and I step out onto the flat gray metal of the walkway that leads to the _Ishimura's _flight lounge. The clunk-clunk of my boots, cold and metallic, echoes through the shuttle bay.

The door to the flight lounge stands ahead. A holographic display pops up as I near, greeting me, in cheerful tones and in alternating languages, to the _Ishimura_.

I palm the door open. It hisses back on its tracks, then settles with another cold, hard thud into the walls. Every sound here seems amplified—the hiss of my own breath through the suit's breathers, the sound of my boots, even the faintest creak from the leathery material of my gloves as they clench on the grips of the pulse rifle I carry.

The flight lounge is fully lighted. There are two doors, one to the left, one in the welcoming booth to my right, the one I ran through the first time we…got…here.

Nicole is standing on the other side of the glass. She's staring at me.

It was just a glimpse. I swing back, playing the somehow weak beam of the pulse rifle over the glass. There's _something_ on the other side of it, but before it was so clear, I could see her, down to the starched white collar of her uniform.

I blink and look away, and in the time that I do, the flashlight beam or the glass or Nicole have somehow _bloomed_, and I can see her right there, one palm against the glass. There's an odd expression on her face, beseeching or joyful or frightened, I can't tell.

Then a ceiling panel a short way behind and to her right wiggles and drops out. I watch it drop. It seems to take minutes. I wait for the clang that will warn her, because there's something up there in the vent, something long-limbed and covered with clotted gore, that drops down like some sort of agile slug to the ground.

But the grate from the vent hits the ground without a sound, the first thing without noise in this whole twisted thing, and when it comes down out of the ceiling it too hits without noise.

Then it rears up behind Nicole and brings its scything, ripping blades down. One drives through her with such force it cracks the Plexiglas and gets stuck, pinning her to the window through her right side, and the other rams through her stomach and then pulls _up_ with sickening strength. It is not sharp, but it powers up through her, breaking ribs, tearing a hole through her.

Nicole's head slams the glass, leaving another starburst crack, splitting her scalp. A fine mist of blood sprays the Plexiglas, obscuring what's happening beyond.

I know it's a dream. I've known since the sounds started getting strange. And logically, this is where I should wake up.

I don't. I stand there, listening to her. She doesn't have much breathe left, but it doesn't take much to scream…and she's screaming.

How can I dream of her screaming when I've never heard her scream?

The thing is butchering her.

She cuts off abruptly. The window stays misted, though tiny drops of blood begin to trickle down it. I can hear the thing moving on the other side.

I haven't moved a step.

The pustulent, swollen remains of a hand slap against the bloody plexi, wiping it, smearing it away. A face peers out, a face with green eyes in a twisted, mutilated face. Nicole glares at me.

Then her expression changes and I realize she's not looking at me, she's looking at something behind—

I jerk upright in the pilot's seat as my RIG goes nuts. A siren shrieks at me through the helmet speakers. Right warning signs in code and in Standard flash across the faceplate. I slap wildly, wondering what the hell is going on. My cutter is handy. I snatch it up and jump out of the pilot's couch, spinning to cover the whole flight deck.

It's empty. I chin a control in my helmet and shut the sirens off. My ears hurt. Then I notice the red readouts.

_Unknown substance detected, _they say_, seek medical attention._

I frown. Then realization comes, and I shut them off too.

RIGs. Beautiful things…until you do something they aren't designed to deal with. Like eating methamphetamine for…medical uses.

The world is sharper. I check my chronometer and find I was in the chair, either asleep or…elsewhere…for over fifty minutes.

Was I asleep? Does it even matter? For now, at least, I'm not going to be able to sleep for awhile. And…I dreamed.

There were _other_ reasons I didn't want to sleep. Besides being afraid I'd get killed, I mean.

A series of cold shivers run down my body as I think about the dream. It's not as if I haven't seen enough people die in the last day. I know what it looks like.

What it sounds like is a whole different story. I suspect it sounds a lot like any other living thing getting torn apart…but I haven't gotten used to it yet. Fates will, I never will.

And why was I standing there? Why didn't I _do_ something? That pulse rifle could have punched right through the Plexiglas, could have taken that thing out before it reached her. I _could_ have killed it.

Like I could have gotten here a little sooner, like before this whole thing happened, as if I could have seen what would be and gotten Nicole out of here.

Rationalizing doesn't help. Neither does telling myself it was just a dream…because right about now, I'm starting to fudge the dividing line between the two.

At least I'm awake enough to think clearly, awake enough, perhaps, to pick up my cutter and rifle and get the hell back on the _Ishimura…_

And face those things again.

The course is already laid out as a preplot. All I need to do is push go. I pick up my pulse rifle, the worn, battered thing, the third or fourth I've found since they kept getting destroyed, and reach out to push the button.

My hand won't do it.

I frown down at it. _WTF_, a part of my mind seems to say, _move your ass, arm. Get up there and hit that control._

Another series of cold shakes run up and down my spine. My RIG beeps in warning. I check it. My heart has just skipped a beat.

I look back at the control. _Initiate_, it says, in glowing green holographic script.

I can't do it.

I can't go back there.

_What is this?_ that piece of my mind seems to say. _You a chicken? Scared?_

Yes. Yes, I'm scared. I'm as scared as I have ever been in my life, equal with when they first came out of the walls and killed half the security team, as scared as I was when the hive mind had me by one leg and that leg felt like it would break in half.

I can't go back there. Nicole is there, I can save Kendra's life if I do…

_But I can't go back._

Where's the hope now, Isaac? Where's the faith that you'll get out of this alive, that Nicole will be alright and Kendra will get all fixed up and you'll all waltz off back to beautiful life?

I can't.

My hands shake uncontrollably. I clench them into fists and raise one to smash that damned control down.

My hand stays up, in the air. Wavers, back and forth. But stays there.

Truth, I don't know that Nicole is even alive. But that's not the issue.

Truth, I'd rather Kendra didn't die, but that's not the issue either.

I don't want to go back to those halls, where every single thing seems to be smeared with blood, where bodies lie in twisted heaps and the marks on the floor show where others have gotten up and walked away, where I can't turn my back on _anywhere_ for more than a second, or else they'll come out and it'll be _over_, like the thousand times before it was _over_, but I was lucky enough to get free and then kill them, again.

Luck is only going to give me so much. I think my lifetime supply is just about gone. All used up, in six hours.

I stand and spin away from the control board, unable to look at the button. _Pansy_, that part of me seems to scream. _You're afraid, and you're afraid, and you know that if you go back there, you will not come back out._

That pisses me off. In that one moment where there's nothing but anger in my brain, I spin and smash my hand down on the sign.

_Initialized, _says the pilot's screen. _Estimated time to arrival, 10.2 minutes. And welcome in advance to the USG Ishimura_.

I fall down in the chair, wondering what I've done. I do that for awhile, until the counter hits 8 minutes.

Then I open a new text file in my RIG and make a list. I should be good with the damned things, all mechanized skills are just complex, tiered, layered lists now.

_1) Dock_

_2) Send shuttle back out._

_3) Find Nicole (c.q.)_

_4) Bring shuttle back in_

_5) Get Kendra_

_6) Send shuttle back out._

_7) Fix Kendra (med.)_

_8) Bring shuttle back in._

_9) Leave._

It looks nice. It looks efficient. It looks simple.

It will be anything but. That's how it's worked so far, why not now?

My RIG beeps. My heart rate just jumped over 120. No wonder I feel a little weird.

_3 minutes_.

I watch as the cracked ball of Aegis VII slowly slides out of view behind the massive projections of the _Ishimura_. It cuts off most of the sunlight, too, turning the universe darker than normal. I've got my cutter in one hand, my pulse rifle in the other.

I imagine that I look scared shitless. But that's a nice thing—this sort of suit doesn't have a built-in compact.

I blink. A joke?

Good god, am I actually trying to be funny?

I look down at my cutter, then at the pulse rifle.

I palm the door open and go down to the tiny cargo bay, to look for some bigger flashlights. I place one below, on the grip, and one to either side, and then I get a massive roll of what has to be the universe's oldest tool, and duct tape the lights on. They aren't puny lights like the ones on my suit—they put out half a million candlepower apiece.

I tape one to the base of my plasma cutter, too. Then, poking around, I find several small exterior shuttle lights wrapped in sealed containers. They were meant as replacements for those on the shuttle, if need be, but…

I soon find out that without a lot of work, they won't fit into my suit. Damn.

The real issue is ammunition. I've two full power cells for the plasma cutter and less than a hundred shots for the pulse rifle.

My hands have stopped shaking.

A gentle vibration comes through the hull. I seal the door, run back forward, and watch as the _Harmina_ slides neatly into the remaining slip inside the _Ishimura's_ shuttle bay. _Docking complete_, the pilot's screen announces.

I run back to the cargo cabinet and yank out three more massive lights. They're generally used for EVAs when you don't have a vehicle to provide illumination. Using more duct tape, I tape two facing more or less forward on my suit's thighs, then another diagonally across my chest, under my RIG screen. They use a touch button for on and off.

I've started shaking again. All over, and my breathing makes me feel I'm going to either choke or have a heart attack.

Enough diddling. I pick up my cutter and stick it to my belt strap. I lift the pulse rifle and palm the door open.

The cold gray of the shuttle bay floor looks back at me. The place is empty of all life, at least that which I can see. I palm the door shut again, walk back to the pilot's chair, and set for automatic liftoff in twenty seconds. Then I walk back outside.

I watch it lift and leave again in quick glances over my right shoulder. I'm really more focused on what's ahead, at and beyond the door to the flight lounge. The shuttle bay is dim, not quite dark, but not bright enough.

I click on first one, then another thigh lamp. They flood the area ahead with shifting light as my legs move. Then I click on two of the three mounted on my rifle. Everything leaps into sharp relief. My faceplate actually dims a little bit so I'm not dazzled.

As I approach the flight lounge door, lit up like some kind of armored angel sans wings, I really feel I should be thinking something impressive. I'm not sure why, but nothing comes to mind.

Just…

A brief resurgence of the shivers, and resignation.

At least I know I'll be able to pull the trigger.

((A))

A/N:

Much to my surprise, this story has garnered more attention than any other I've written on this site—probably because it's about a game that just came out.

In any case, I'll take the time to say _something_ to all those who didn't bother to login and to whom I thus can't reviewreply.

So thank you **Talos, Anon**…**The Guy**, who said anything about my killing him? And we've definite different opinions on whether he's a badass or not…anyway, thanks. Thank you **eliteElite**.

Is there more to say? Not in this AN, at least. Tata,

K. Stramin

(again c. 11p.m.)


	3. Reverse Engineering

3

Reverse Engineering

_Life found a way._

_ --Jurassic Park (1994)_

_((A))  
_

_Tick, tick_.

My armored boots against the long walk down to the flight lounge door. I docked the _Harmina _in the bay to my left, as the shattered remains of the _Kellion_ still decorate the floor of the bay over the edge to my right.

Via remote link, using the keypad embedded into the left arm of my suit, I lift the _Harmina_ up out of its slip. Half of my vision blanks out, then flickers into a view from one of the _Harmina's_ forward visual sensors. Using it, I guide the ugly, triangular shuttle back out of the launch bay. As it passes through the energy fields that hold in the shuttle deck's atmosphere, I close out the camera and punch in commands to bring the _Harmina_ to a halt two hundred thousand kilometers out from Aegis VII. In a few minutes it will be too far out for me to control via my RIG…but quite far out enough to miss any stray things that might still be drifting in the debris field.

I keep my eye on the ships systems display, expecting, despite all my precautions, that the _Harmina_ might suddenly explode, or run into an asteroid. Instead, my RIG reaches its signal range and blanks out, leaving me staring at two words: _signal lost._

I check left and right, the blazing glare of the flashlights painting grotesque shadows wherever they happen_ not_ to be at that precise moment. I'm focusing in on the lights, on what they reveal. Not a particularly good idea when all these slithering, slashing creatures cling to the shadows. I widen my vision, looking into the shadows as well as at the light. With three flashlights the rifle is noticeably heavier in my hands.

It's the only true weapon I have. The plasma cutter, while funked-out and deadly accurate, is part of any standard engineering kit. And, oddly enough, it seems to be more effective than the rifle sometimes.

_ Clunk, clunk._

My boots on the decking. Fifteen feet from the flight lounge door. I feel like I'm moving in quicksand. I feel like growling as I lift a foot, stomp forward and down, then drag the other behind me. _Nicole. I'm going…to find…Nicole._

She _has_ to be alive. If she isn't…well, there isn't much point in my being here. I can't help Kendra without what Nicole knows. I'm no doctor, and even though I could probably fix most of the stuff inside the medical bay, I don't know what _medical_ uses the things could be put to.

I'm at the door. I don't remember crossing the last ten feet. Recalling my training for a moment, I tap in a code to my RIG to synchronize with the _Ishimura_. A map of the flight deck flashes up and outlines my position with a blue dot.

I reach out with one hand and palm the door open. With a quiet _click_, the panels slide sideways.

In my absence, something has utterly trashed the entry room. The lockers that once lined the walls have been ripped at. Several have been torn from the walls. Blackish fluid—days old blood, once pumped through alien veins that don't hold with needing hemoglobin—is smeared across the floor and wall and ceiling to my left, as if something has been squished along it. I'm reminded of what that massive thing did to Hammond in the _Valor's_ engine room.

Something tickles in the back of my brain. Engines. Something about that, something I'm forgetting. Something important, but that I can't quite remember.

Something I should be putting aside because I'm nearing the door to the flight lounge proper, and I can't be distracted. I stop and tap open my RIG, open a new file, and input _Engine, forgetting something?_ then close it.

The righthand inner lounge door is dented and bulged, and the locking spikes that connect with the other side of the door are gone. In their place gapes a hole in the steel, illuminated by flickers of reddish emergency light from the lounge. The doors have closed but that one no longer rests entirely on its tracks, knocked off-kilter by something I don't really want to think about.

I step forward, keeping a goodly distance between the hole in the door and myself. Those tentacles…

The door clicks and whirs and tries to open, and the dented righthand panel rolls back a foot, then falls out of its tracks and away from me, into the lounge. It hits the floor with a deafening _thud_, smashing several dead things under it, spraying decaying flesh away from me. The thud seems to rock the room and stops me in my tracks, frozen, listening for the slightest sound. The fear wells up again. I want to turn and run, to run back to the end of the docking bay and call the shuttle and get the hell out of here.

I give it a mental stomp and grind at it, and for a moment I seem to be crushing my own throat as it closes up and I can't swallow.

Then the need passes, and there is silence.

I step onto the door. It eases down soggily, resting on the remains of the necromorphs I dismembered on my way to join Nicole…whatever had been _posing_ as Nicole.

That's another thing I don't have time to think about. RIG, open another file, dump that idea into it—_what was Nicole?_ and close it…and from behind me comes a strange squelching, sucking sound.

I spin around and see one of those white-skinned, bewinged creatures with a mutated, stunted human head sprouting between white, bony wings made from the remnants of its arms, and the vestiges of a spinal column draping down through the folds of whiteness. I don't have a name for them, don't _want_ to have a name for them. _Vampire_ is the word that leaps to mind as I raise my rifle and open fire on it, as red light suddenly sweep the room and the ever-irritating, dispassionate voice of the _Ishimura's_ computer announces,

"_Unknown biohazard detected. Executive lockdown has been imposed in the flight lounge."_

The pulse rifle bucks and spits white fire. The white thing leaps to the side with the same horrifying agility they all have, clinging to a wall strut, then scrambling onto the ceiling and clawing its way toward me. The energy bolts my rifle fires tear into the blast doors just now locking me out from the shuttle bay. They're sliding down over the elevator to the tram system and the doorway through which lounge operators enter and leave as well but _no time no time where is it?_

For some reason—maybe the amphetamine, maybe the adrenaline now ramjetting through my system—I can make out the exact features of the thing. It's half of a mouth is still working, broken teeth champing, white tendons in its neck stretching and relaxing as its fused, inhuman, eyeless head bobs up and down. I swing the rifle to follow it, tearing a path along the ceiling. It leaps to the floor and I jerk the rifle back down, spearing it with the lights—and with the rounds pouring out of the gun.

It jerks and twitches. The rifle isn't really suited to _severing_. It was made to put _holes_ into things, particularly things that are injured when they get big holes in them. The thing flaps a shattered wing and flops forward with the same insane tenacity of every single other one I've seen.

I drop the pulse rifle and snatch out the cutter. It has no sights, I rely on my own instinct after having used one for years on where the beam will go.

The blast catches it at the junction between left wing and body. The spike of plasma vaporizes bone and flesh and blood and tears a hole in the steel deck. In passing the tremendous heat sets the winged thing on fire. It rolls, shrieking and bathed in flame, until I put a blast into its neck.

My RIG is beeping at me. I cancel it without checking—something about my heart rate, probably. It sounds like that sort of beep. No time to check. I slap the cutter back onto my belt, pick up my rifle, and make a careful way over to the remains of the thing.

It's dead, but I stomp on it several times to be sure. Once again I'm glad the standard engineering suit means big metal boots.

There's a whisper of sound to my left, further off in the flight lounge. As I turn the briefest part of my mind traces back to undergraduate school, and a course I took on focusing attention. _Tunnel_ vision, the instructor had said. Both good and bad, because you can focus on the task at hand, but you will miss the other bits.

Razor-limbed and deadly fast, another of the creatures rushes out of the shadows. It's on me before I can turn, but its huge blade-arms are up high, not poised to stab or rip. It's off-balance too. _Weird, I haven't seen that before—no time_—I turn and jam the stubby tri-barrel of the rifle into its huge armpit and open fire. It rocks backward, one arm flying free and I jam the gun into its ugly, swollen, stinking face and blow its head off.

Of course it doesn't die. But without eyes to see with, it's a bit less dangerous. I manage it with one shot from the plasma cutter to take the other arm off.

Again the floor is littered with severed limbs. Sanguine light plays about the entire scene in pulses from overhead lights. The computerized quarantine has not lifted. I play the beams of the rifle around the room. Empty of all living things except myself. When we first came onboard, Hammond and Kendra and I, and the two dead security men—truth, I can't even remember their _names_ now—the lockdown quarantined the entire shuttle deck.

But then, _now_ I know the _Ishimura's_ computer systems are a little screwy, owing to faithful sabotage and unfaithful attempts to fix them…and monsters ripping their way through air vents and wiring closets.

Sanguine light sweeps across me. I don't have time for this. I stand in the flight lounge, waiting for something else to spring out at me. Nothing does, for the moment. I back into a vent-less corner and half-crouch. I put down the rifle and pull out the cutter. Holding it in my left hand, I type into the RIG keypad on my left forearm.

I bring up the file where I stored Captain Matthias' RIG information—after I'd killed his reanimated body in the morgue. It's a huge jumble of information, a copy-and-paste job with all the accessory information. Too accurately use it I'd need to know which parts were which. Kendra did that before, but I need out _now_. I'm not a computer engineer, but I have a few tricks—and this is the entirety of what Matthias had in his RIG.

_//core/write/_

_Verification?_

I type in a long string of numbers and letters, a code I worked out a long time ago, several years after I first got a RIG and decided to play around with it. Years before I met Nicole

She keeps creeping into my thoughts. Creeping…

But that word brings up unpleasant memories, even if they aren't real. My RIG contemplates my input for a long while before shutting down all of its standard processes and letting me access the core programming of the miniature computer I wear on my back.

_Core granted._

//_ident_

_//codes/show_

My RIG instantly spits out a stream of symbols, the identifying information that says the person wearing this is me, Isaac Clarke, with such and such blood type and such and such allergies, and such and such access levels.

_//copy_

I open a new text file and dump my ident information into it, then

_ //codes/clear_all_

My RIG screen flickers, as if uncertain.

_Code clearing requires double authorization._

I authenticate it twice. My RIG blinks and goes blank for a moment. A heart-stopping moment, the first time I did this.

A slithering? I jerk up. The rifle, lying on the floor, plays its lights across a small section of the room, by the lights I taped on my suit show there are still no other things in here with me. I stand and survey the room carefully. The vents in the ceiling appear empty. The Plexiglas wall separating the lounge from the operator's station opaque in the harsh glare of my lights and I can't see much beyond them. A tremble runs up and down my body as I remember the dream.

I fire a round through a random section of Plexiglas. It cracks and wrinkles away from the bolt's heat, but cannot shatter. A horizontal hole remains, blasted through the plastic. Darkness gapes beyond.

Still standing, ignoring that opaque glass for the moment, I turn my attention back to my RIG. I may not be an expert in computer systems, but I've been dealing with RIGs since I started in engineering. First designed by some obscure little company several hundred years ago and left fallow, their patent expired, until CEC and several other companies simultaneously re-discovered them…and put them to work.

My RIG flickers back to life, loaded via the manufacturer's embedded software.

//input1/codes

I sub-task and bring up the file in which I stored Captain Mathius's RIG information. Being an engineer, dealing with complexities of mechanics and computers that can change year by year, the one thing my RIG has is memory—another reason why I could actually do this.

Careful not to copy over and risk an error, or my RIG informing me that I'm reverse-engineering what I shouldn't be, I type in Mathius's codes, essentially transforming the RIG I'm wearing into a copy of what he had on when he died.

I try to remember whether when I copied the codes the first time, his RIG was still functional and on the net. If so when I'm done, the _Ishimura's _computer will suddenly detect _two_ RIGSbelonging to Captain Mathius. Such things can cause system crashes.

My RIG springs to life again. _Welcome, Captain Mathius_, it reads across the top of the projected holographic screen.

There's a slight possibility that this won't work. If there was time between when the captain died and when everyone else started dying, someone in the morgue might have marked Mathius as "DECEASED" in the ship's log and thus canceled out the effectiveness of his codes…but probably not.

_ //executive_orders/lockdown_, I type.

It flashes up a map of the _Ishimura_, highlighting three areas in red—an Engineering sublevel, one of the sublevels of the mining deck, and the flight deck. I peer at the screen.

_ //executive_orders/lockdown_fltlng_stat/off_

There is a long pause. I hold my breath. _Nothing will happen. Nothing ever happens—_

The red lights stop pulsing and withdraw into the ceiling. The white ones come back on. With a clatter, blast doors open, revealing the shuttle bay and the elevator to the tram.

"_Executive lockdown has been lifted."_

I take a deep breath. I feel suddenly as if I've been lifted off of the ground by my own bones and held there, without effort or strain. For the first time since I first stepped onto this damned ship, I've some measure of control over it.

I just wonder why in the hell we didn't do this sooner. It might have kept more of us alive. Panic, maybe? Shortsightedness and a saboteur amongst us?

Crossing the room, lights playing across the walls, I glare into the dark gap behind the Plexiglas. There are no things lurking back there.

I step into the elevator and let it take me down to the tram.

On the way down I play with my RIG a little more, calling up information on where exactly the _Harmina_ is at the moment. My RIG doesn't have that range but I can use a communication channel to make a contact and extrapolate from that. It's holding steady—as steady as I can tell, at this range—three hundred thousand km distant from the _Ishimura_, mostly out of Aegis VII's gravity well and, hopefully, free of crawling creatures. A diagnostic shows that all systems are functioning normally.

A tiny warning _beep_ locks a red section in the rear of the shuttle. I freeze, staring at the screen, as the lift brings me down to the tram level.

Luck holds with me again, because if there had been anything on the tram platform I'd probably have died. I fumble with the keypad, querying what the problem with the _Harmina_ is.

_Status:_

_ LS: Full_

_ Power Distribution: Full_

_ Communications: Full_

_ Food Supply: 99.125_

_ Engines:_

_ Sublight: Full_

_ SP Drive: Inactive_

I stare at the screen for a long moment, feeling a bubbling surge of anger. It doesn't do anything, simply seethes, because whoever it was who sabotaged the _Harmina's_ shockdrive is no doubt dead or in more pain that I could put him through. Kyne told me about it the first time we met, but everything else he said put it right out of my head.

No shock drive means no FTL engines. But to my surprise, instead of sinking back into the semi-depression my mind has conjured since Kendra told me her version of Nicole, I immediately start coming up with ways to fix the drive.

The _Ishimura_ has a shock drive, probably an active one, too, though probably too large to salvage anything from. The _Valor_ also had a shock drive, though it's probably too totaled to do much with—and we took out the core anyway. The _Kellion_ would probably fit perfect, if any components survived that burning crash in the shuttle bay.

In any case, that's something to think about later. I open the file about "Engine" and delete it.

The tram station is quiet. No sounds come along the tracks. I link to the _Harmina _again and try to pull up information about Kendra's condition, but the autodoc isn't linked into the ship-to-ship system.

I step onto the tram and touch the glowing section of the holographic _Ishimura_ labeled "Crew Deck"—then spin around to watch my own back. So far, nothing has touched me when I'm on a tram, but those things are in the tram system too.

The doors slide shut and I stand, facing them, as it takes me at 80kph through the bowels of the _Ishimura_.

The tram slides past half-lit bulbs in the ceiling of the tram tunnel as we slow. Shadows flicker all around, except in the beams of my dazzling lights. The doors slide open, revealing the atrium of the crew deck.

The bodies are gone.

When I first came here, it had seemed like a scene straight from hell. Dozens of bodies, the loyal crew of the _Ishimura_, their heads wrapped with white cloth, holes in their skulls, proof of their devotion to a faith…

The truth of Unitology doesn't need explaining. Not to me, at least.

Flickering red and pale white light had lumed the scene, lanterns placed in an almost ceremonial fashion.

Now the bodies are gone. All but a few, and these already so damaged even those recombining nightmares couldn't do anything with them. The remains of those they'd already tried to change…the ones I blew apart.

My palms are sweaty, but the slickness doesn't transfer to the outside of my suit. My grip on my rifle is enough to make the polymer pistol grip creak. I don't let up. I step out of the tram, sweeping the area with my lights. Empty, but for the dead. Many of the candles in their lanterns have gone out—without Mercer and other fanatics here to keep them alight.

My mind has come back from engineering, and from Nicole, and what's wrong with the shockpoint drive on the _Harmina_. There is no time to think of those things. Not here. The atrium is huge. My lights splash across the walls but can't even begin to illuminate the whole area at once. The emergency lights in walls and ceiling aren't functioning properly—they shed only a dim glow. There's one problem to fix, but not now either.

Putting my back to the lefthand wall, I enter the atrium, sweeping the light across the upper level. It seems empty. There is no sound.

When I first came here, I thought I heard something—a voice, a human voice, singing. Echoing through air vents, whispering something I didn't know.

There is no voice now.

So I slide my way down the wall until I reach the doorway leading into Sleep Block C. On my previous visit to this place, this was where the regenerating, gore-spewing thing Mercer sent after me chased me through tangled blocks of bunks. Efficient for storing sleeping people they might be, but if anyone ever got stuck in them…

That's precisely what I'm hoping. That Nicole got into one of the bunks and backed it up against another one, or against an outer wall. These tall stacks of bunks have only one exit—the mostly rectangular exit on one side. Inside one of those, she could have survived.

I check my RIG, type in another locate command.

_Crew Member name?_

_//maptracker/add/RIGA14-17//_

My RIG brings up a three-dimensional image of the crew deck, fading out the surrounding decks and the hull. I stand at the entrance to Sleep Block C, a glowing blue dot. A moment later another dot springs to life, some distance inside the sleep block.

Rows of bunks tower around me. Each is four bunks high, seven feet long, some nine feet tall, and four feet deep. More than enough space for the average muscled engineer—plenty for someone of Nicole's size, or mine.

The little dot indicating the position of Nicole's RIG seems to be several rows back. The air inside the sleep block is cool, with the faintest hint of mist in the air. No sign of the pollution that seeped through the whole ship some hours ago. No sound but the distant rumble of the air purification system.

Since I left the shuttle I've met only two of the things Kyne calls Necromorphs. There should have been fifty between the flight deck and here. The lack of opposition is unnerving, disturbing. Every second nothing happens my muscles get tighter, more prone to snap.

I start off through the mist. Sleep blocks tower around me, forming a bizarre maze that I have to thread through. Then I come up against a solid wall of the sleep towers—the same wall that I trapped the regenerating monster behind, briefly.

I tap my kinesis unit on and reach out with my hand. The visible beam of light that is a side-effect of the kinesis reaction—and thus a useful targeting method—lances out and connects with the flash-lit bulk of the sleep bunks. I shift my hand to the side. The motion of my arm travels along the beam, amplified and magnified, until the bunk block groans and shifts to the side along miniscule tracks in the floor, opening a black hole I instantly flood with my lights.

Another bunk block, this time completely enclosed. Another familiar sight. Beyond is another block, and beyond that the far wall of this sleep block. It extends to the right and left an unknown distance—probably several hundred feet. Hundreds of bunks for hundreds of crew, all dead now.

I shift the hole behind me closed. With it open, I can't get into the next block, but for the moment I've trapped myself in this 10x10 square of steel.

Then I realize another weird thing, something I hadn't noticed until now…because there had been nothing to notice.

The body parts are gone. Inside this room I blasted several of the things apart, and cut the limbs off of Mercer's tortured monster for the hundredth time, it seemed…and all the body parts are gone. The only ones I've seen were the pieces of the crew I killed so they couldn't be turned into monsters, all the way back in the atrium.

Weird. And on this ship, disturbing. It was bad enough when normal dead bodies started crawling around. The pieces I'd blown off of those slashing things and crawling things, and jumping spitting exploding things, at least stayed dead when they were dead.

_Bio-recombinants_, Kendra had said. Was there any reason that the virus, or plague, couldn't infect individual pieces? I don't know. Nor do I want to be mobbed with pieces of tails, or hands, or claws.

Imagination isn't a good thing on this ship, Isaac. Imagination can make you dead. It's all too easy to see something behind a corner when there's really something in the ceiling above you. Calm…down.

Talking to myself doesn't help. My feet seem to have been glued to the floor again. Subtle but violent shivers start up and down my triceps. Underneath my suit I'm soaked in sweat, again. My mouth is dry. My RIG lets out a soft beep. I glance down at it.

_Range: 2 m_

I blink at it, then sweep the space around me, my paralysis momentarily broken. All around, the floor is clear, yet my RIG shows Nicole's RIG as being…here.

Faint green light dances out from a segmented metal sheathe half-hidden beneath the thin blanket on the bunk opposite me.

My RIG blips again. It seems my heart has just skipped a beat.

I reach out with a hand that feels like it might break off at the wrist, and slide the RIG free. A standard issue, a crystalline microcomputer protected by a layer of silvery carbon steel. Rib-like projections intended to protect the ventral body cavity and provide monitoring functions spread out from it.

It's still powered on, else I couldn't have found it. I set it down on the floor and reach toward my RIG for a diagnostic interface.

A hissing wind sweeps through the cell block, past me and into the misty depths, drawing with it the bluish white haze. The air doesn't clear. The hissing goes on. The blanket on the bunk flaps and slips half off, where it puddles on the floor like a green blob. The wind ends and the blanket goes still.

I stare down at it. A weird urge grows inside me to pick it up. Immediately, an even stronger urge warns me not to get anywhere near that damned thing. It's a blanket, for god's sake—

No, it's not. Don't touch it.

This makes absolutely no sense. I touched the blanket already. It's just a blob of cloth there on the floor. But I cannot bend down and pick it up. My knees will not bend, my hand will not reach.

I turn and run for the door. Sweat streaks the interior of my helmet, blurring the brightness of my flashlight beams. Rifle in one hand, fingers almost breaking with the strain, Nicole's RIG gripped in the other.

Nothing stops me. Nothing jumps out at me or out of the ceiling, or pokes its face around a corner. I keep expecting it. By the time I reach the doorway to the atrium I'm almost _hoping_ to get jumped. This silence…in some ways, it's worse than the constant, terrifying racket. It seems to whisper to me _there is no one here…you know that, don't you?_ In some sort of hissing, sibilant voice, all the more frightening because of its blatant lie.

I reach the atrium of the crew deck uncontested and unharmed, and stop.

What in hell is happening? Where are all the creatures? Before I left I could barely take a step without treading on one. If that thing down on Aegis, that worm-being, was controlling them all, and they're all dead because _it's_ dead…why didn't they fall down wherever they were?

Instead, they are somewhere. Somewhere else, probably _doing_ something else…and nothing they can do is good.

I step onboard the tram, punch for the flight deck and sit at one end, covering the entirety of the rest of the car with the cutter. Only then do I unreel a one meter diagnostic cord from my RIG and plug into a recessed port on Nicole's. I interface with little difficulty—Captain Matthias' clearance grants me the right to do almost anything I can with the ship, at least via a RIG--and access the lifesigns log. A brief flash has me wondering what would have happened had Matthias survived a little longer, time enough for the computer to register Dr. Kyne's words and process them fully. Declaring a captain incompetent—which only a ship's physician can do—would undoubtedly lock out the captain's RIG codes.

But then, things went a little haywire with the computer. Obviously it didn't have the time. Nicole's RIG flashes and bring me back to the moment.

The RIG is running in low power mode, Normally a RIG can run for several weeks without recharge of cell replacement. Maybe the answer will be in the logs.

Times are logged in ship's time, the 24 hour day based after that of Earth. I skip over the last few days, noting a spike in blood pressure almost a week ago that stayed up. Nicole's usual b/p stayed somewhere between 100/60 and 110/68. The entirety of her time during the…deaths it never went below 150 systolic, even when she was registered as being asleep.

Not as if I needed that to tell me how she'd felt. I punch buttons with more force than necessary, jumping past statistics for blood chemical content and the basic logs of the last week. RIGS log enormous amounts of information, partly so the people wearing them can be aware of their own conditions, and partly to help physicians determine cause of death, if it's unclear.

Nicole's last RIG check, the regular 1/hour, was made over five days ago.

_1400.00: bp155/130,p124,r40,t(ax)99.8,O297_

_1500.00 Alert issued: xenosubstance detected in bloodstream. Ident (unknown) ref. medic1289.568.45(d)_

_1500.06.46: Alert issued: bp200/185,p212,r0,t99.9,O286 Critical medical condition._

_1500.06.51: Alert issued: c-com (currentsyncsys{Ishimura}) Critical medical condition._

_1500.06.53: Emergent1: AELS initiated._

_1500.06.56: Alert issued: c-com (currentsyncsys{Ishimura})resp=0._

_1500.06.75: Alert issues: c-com(currentsyncsys{Ishimura}) Critical medical condition advis2._

_1505.06.53: AELS=90, op=1_

_1520.06.53: AELS=60, op=1_

_1523.12.43: RIG disconnect(auth/emer/med/145545)_

Gibberish, most of it. The basic life readings don't tell me any more than Nicole's kindly recorded message does—at 1500 five days ago she injected herself with something that wreaked havoc on her system. The RIG sent out automatic emergency signals and, in the meantime, turned on an automated emergency life support subsystem. Using its own power cell, the RIG tapped into Nicole's nervous and muscular system and kept her breathing, and her heart beating…for twenty three more minutes. Until someone with medical clearance took Nicole's RIG off.

The tram slides to a stop. Shadows from the overhead lights flicker and dance. I sit, staring at the door. Nothing outside moves.

The RIG is a dead end. For the last four days it hasn't been anywhere near Nicole. And she, wherever she is, doesn't have anything else on her to keep track of her.

I disconnect the RIGS and reel up my cord. I glance at my chronometer.

It's been more than an hour since I stepped onboard. It feels like five minutes. Slow time.

A long, hissing, rushing wind fills the tram tunnel, strong enough to whistle through the metal slats of the ceiling and pull Nicole's RIG a tiny ways along the bench. I snatch it up and run outside as the wind ends…then abruptly begins again, this time hissing back in the opposite direction.

I stare down the tram tunnel, into the blackness. The brilliance of my rifle lights penetrates only a hundred and fifty yards or so. The elevated tracks are clear, as is the floor under them. Dried blood spatters the tunnel walls in several places.

It's not a place to linger. I turn and step into the elevator up to the flight lounge…which is empty.

Too much of this and I might not pay attention. I might get incautious…that, of course, is when they'd come. These things aren't stupid

The flight lounge is empty. As I pause at it's entrance I call for the _Harmina_. Twenty thousand kilometers away, the executive shuttle's engines come to life. ETA six minutes.

I step out onto the flight deck. To my left the wreckage of the _Kellion_ lies scattered across half the bay. My lights pick out unidentifiable bits of garbage and junk, now useless. Most probably, the singularity core is junk too, so much smashed gravitic crystal. But with five minutes left until the _Harmina _arrives, and nothing to do but wait…I don't want to come back here just to look for the damned thing after I find Nicole…wherever the hell she's gone.

A turn back, into the flight lounge, and out. I switch the gravity off. Immediately, the boots of my suit lock onto the deck. My arms drift. A peculiar half-queasy sensation, quite familiar, gathers in the pit of my stomach.  
A sojourn through gravity-free air. I land amidst the junk that is now floating through the air. A piece of decking floats past, painted with a striped yellow line and the letters CAU…

I push it out of the way and tap at my RIG to bring up a radmeter display. Even shielded, a singularity core occasionally gives off rays. I link the meter in to my helmet speakers—a tool four centuries old, primitive and effective as the day it was made.

There is the quietest click of background radiation, but nothing more. I wade through a thin mist of pulverized metal, vaporized in the explosion and drifting with the rest of the debris. Then my helmet starts crackling. I turn one way, it fades. I turn the other way—and there, floating along down by the floor, is a cracked, dented diamond-shaped container. I reach out toward it and my radmeter screams.

I switch it off. Retrieving the _Valor's_ singularity core exposed me to more radiation than was healthy as well, but that was in an active engine. This thing has been cracked open. I wonder if it's even in one piece inside there.

But it doesn't matter right now. The bay doors are opening. The _Harmina_ is perched outside, waiting for me. An escape, albeit brief, from this haunted wreck.

A flapping, a fluttering behind me. I spin, slow in the low gravity. A white shape—part of a wing? A tail? Flops out of sight behind a bulkhead. Without a thought I launch myself upward, through the air, toward the hatch of the Harmina.

Not a particularly smart move. If I managed to get in front of it, even moving as slow as it is, the shuttle would crush me. But this time, at least, my aim is good. I slam into underside and scrabble along it, not looking back. If there is something in the bay, the first damned thing—of _course_ the first damned thing—that it's going to do is something to my only transport, my only sanctuary, that will leave me on this crippled, hell-bathed ship again.

The _Harmina's _hatch opens and I fall inside—then flat onto the floor as the smaller ship's gravity takes hold. I palm the door shut and race forward, stabbing at the buttons to take us the hell _out_ of here.

Smoothly, unhurried, we leave the flight deck and float out again into space. I drop the singularity core between the pilot and co-pilot's seats and run back to the hatch to make sure the thing didn't get in. Then I run back to the cockpit and peer out the viewport. If it jumped well enough it could have landed on the outside of the hull. But I don't see it. Doesn't mean anything but…

The _Harmina_ is headed out. Back to a safe stationkeeping orbit, two hundred thousand miles away from the _Ishimura_.

For a few moments, onboard, while I was thinking about Nicole, I hadn't been afraid. Now, here, in this tiny ship, I am again.

There's something blinking on the holopad in front of me. It's one of those indicators that means I should take a look at it—or at least, the ship's computer thinks I should take a look at it. I ignore it and head toward the tiny sickbay—rather, repurposed cargo room—where the autodoc is. The door slides open.

Kendra, intubated, with an IV of morphine. I hang a new bag of plasma—one of only three liters the autodoc carries. Over an hour spent with the primitive instruction of the autodoc has left her right arm shorter than nature intended. The autodoc recommended—in the clinical, index-like way holograph diagrams have—that I amputate her left leg below the knee, thus to "save the joint". I'm not a surgeon. Kendra's left leg ends well above her knee, where a clumsy array of stitches holds the skin over the muscle and the muscle over the bone.

There wasn't much I could do for her skull. Fractured yes, and thoroughly, but at the same time there was no evidence of actual brain _damage_, or swelling. In olden times people used metal bits to drill into people's brains…for that un-necessity I can only be grateful.

She's still breathing. Or, if she isn't, the autodoc is doing a pretty competent job of breathing for her. And her heart is still breathing. And, by god, she will _stay_ alive.

Kendra's arm and leg should have been incinerated. But as there's no incinerator of that size onboard, and since I didn't want to open the airlock in deep space and toss them out, there they are, wrapped in moldable plastic on the floor by the autodoc. It makes me leery, having them onboard, especially with that image of crawling dead, altered hands and bits of people that the absence of bodies has left me with.

I turn, palm the door shut, and lock it. Then I retrieve the core from the cockpit and take it back, into the tiny area designated for tools and spare parts. There's very little I'll be able to do with this here, but at least I can figure out what I _need_ to do, and if there's anything to do.

It'll mean another trip into hell. But…I was going back there anyway. Nicole, even if she is dead…she's somewhere onboard.

((A))

A/N: NOT ABANDONED! A great many apologies to the people who patiently waited for this—good news is, there's another one almost done right behind it…life intruded with this story, what else can I say. Again, many thanks for all the reviews. I'd love to scribble about them all but I don't think I can think that well at the moment—so, to what I felt was the pertinent questions. Obviously, the beginning of this tale differs somewhat from the end of Dead Space—it is _implied_ that Nicole died and certainly Kendra being slammed into a building and pieces of her going everywhere mean she's dead, too…but that's now how I'm writing this one. I can assure you that when things get bloody—as they have to—there will be plenty of description. But again, as it's written from character perspective, people under stress don't notice a whole lot of extraneous details. **Redmav**…I wouldn't call it *shanked*, but it pissed me off too. Thus, you're reading this. **A Morning Star**, I think its extended shell-shock rather than indifference, but whichever. I am well aware of what the chapter spell out.

Aside for any future reviewers, I do not intend to use any other sources than the game—no comics, no Downfall, namely because I don't have them and they don't seem to fit anyway.

In any case, expect a chapter to come out tomorrow if not the next day, and (roaring belly laugh of relief) thank god there's enough time to write now.

As for the future, you can expect uncertainty. But know that Isaac isn't going to be the only person fighting for his life in the next few chapters. New characters, yes. Interesting, I hope so. And if you find any inconsistencies, or things I forgot, please let me know—the story's convoluted enough without anything new.

You decide.

K. Stramin

(wtf, 11 p.m. again)


	4. Ukiyo

4

Ukiyo

A glowing, holographic display hovered over the con. It read 1:15, and was counting backward.

Both the pilot and navigator—lieutenants, Berkle and Gerald—glanced at it from time to time, but mostly kept their attention on their consoles.

Beyond them lay the coruscating gray void of the shock drive, stretching forward to a pinpoint of blackness far, far ahead—too far ahead to actually perceive, but the human brains—all eleven onboard—saw it that way because they were physically incapable of seeing it as anything else.

Corporal Harmony Williams, second row, second seat, sat strapped in by a five point harness. From the second row, center seat, she had a marvelous and depressing view of the shock drive—or would have, if not for the man standing stock still between her and it.

He faced the void. From here he was nothing more than a man-shaped shadow against the shock, bulky in black, shell-smooth armor. He wore no helmet. His hair, gray as steel and exactly 1.5 cm in length, lay in perfect arrangement across the back of his head. Slung at his side was a rifle-sized projectile weapon, bulging with a 100 round drum magazine and reflex sight. The bore of the weapon looked to be at least 4cm. He did not move, and though she had had few dealings with him before this, she suspected that even staring into that disturbing void, he did not even blink.

The holographic display read 1:09.

Behind, before, and to either side of Cpl. Williams were six other men and women, all but one in identical black, smooth-shelled armor. It bore their rank on the shoulders, last name and the tag "USMCSF" emblazoned in white. All wore identical black helmets containing microcomputers and various visual scanning equipment. The helmets had visors that ran from ear to ear, providing 180 degree vision without movement, and an integrated HUD. A bulge on the right jawbone of each allowed an oxygen tube into the helmet, connected with the suit's chemical recycling system.

About half carried standard issue pulse rifles. The rest, including Harmony, carried a variety of weaponry, some energy-based, some projectile, depending on preference and needs.

1:01.

"Dropping from shock in one minute," stated the pilot, on the lefthand side.

The uniformed, unarmored man one row up and one seat over looked over at the standing, gray-haired man, and cleared his throat. His voice was cool and calm. "Sgt. Major?"

Sergeant Major Pitwell turned with smooth economy. His eyes, gray like his name and hair, swept the cabin. It was as if a statue had turned, without sound or hint of the energy behind the motion. Harmony felt the tension level immediately leapt in the cabin—and at the same time noted that the Sgt. Major had black eyebrows, a startling contrast to his steely hair.

Clearly, Sgt. Major Pitwell said, "Weapons check."

There came muffled clicking and shuffling. Harmony checked her own weapon, an M35 automatic shotgun loaded with disintegrating anti-personal rounds, then her sidearm, an ME "Emmy" plasma pistol. Both appeared fine. She wasn't going to fire them to find out. Up front, Pitwell looked over his own weapon. He also carried a large propellant-based handgun on his right hip.

:45.

Pitwell's eyes, cold stones, swept the cabin again. When he spoke, he did so slowly, with precision, and an utter calm she suspected no one else onboard shared.

"To reiterate," he said. "As you already know but I will remind you, this is not intended to become a hostile situation."

Some idiot in the back chuckled, but Pitwell let it pass. Not _primarily_ a hostile situation. Once their intentions became clear, when they got where they were going, things might change rapidly. They weren't carrying spitball guns.

"As such," said Pitwell, "Captain Adanama has full command of this platoon and the mission in any and all matters of diplomacy. Is that correct, Sir?"

The captain was shorter than even Harmony, with perfectly trimmed graying black hair and wide, dark eyes that, once in awhile, were just a shade uncertain. He wore a black and blue uniform, rumpled after twelve hours wearing the same clothes. He sat one row up and one seat to the left of Harmony and did not have his harness on. Now he nodded. "That's correct, Sgt. Major."

"In the event that matters come to require our services," continued Pitwell, "Then, and only after the Captain and I have granted permission, are we to engage in counter actions. Anyone failing at these two simple rules will be guilty of disobeying a commanding officer in a combat situation."

He closed his mouth to form a fine line, and looked over them with those cold eyes.

"That is understood, Marines."

"Yes, Sergeant Major!" came seven voices, muffled by their helmets. Harmony felt cold, a weird weakening in her stomach, the beginnings of chills. She shrugged them away with an innateness that had long ago become practiced. They were referred sensations, not her own. She wasn't particularly concerned about this—it was Denell, in the seat behind her, who was nervous. She'd Focus on what mattered. At the moment, he didn't.

"Dropping from shock in fifteen seconds," said the pilot.

Pitwell turned away from them, fitting his own helmet over his head and sealing it, hooking up its armored oxygen cord, double-checking the sync between his suit and the helmet.

"We have exit," said the pilot, as the gray tunnel broke apart and the blackness of space engulfed the front view of the _USG Ukiyo_. The Sgt. Major instantly vanished, black against black, only a blot against the stars.

"Scanning," said the navigator. "We're one hundred twenty thousand kilometers from Aegis VII." Still looking at his instruments, he did not see what Harmony and the rest of the armored Marines saw.

A yellow sun, blinding even at this distance, glared at them out of the dark. Dead ahead, and growing larger with every second, was a planet, surrounded by a massive haze of rocky debris. It was surreal, and surreally beautiful, if anyone onboard cared to think of it as such. Some probably did. Harmony was just breathing deeply, adjusting to her own transition out of the shock—it had always been worse for her than others.

"There's a massive quantity of debris in orbit," said the navigator, "I'm picking up an automated distress beacon from above the top layers. Identifies as the _USG Ishimura_. I'm also picking up an emergency transponder signal, very weak."

"What's it from?" asked the pilot, Lt. Kerry Berkle.

2nd Lt. Gerald hunched over his holographic controls. "It's military," he said, "Keys as the _USM Valor_."

"Just the transponder?"

"Yes, sir."

"Find me what kind of ship that is," said Captain Adanama. Next to him, Cpl. Maywell opened the database on his arm-mounted minicomp.

Lt. Berkle flicked hair a full 2 centimeters longer than regs out of his eyes. Rocket jockeys had always been given more room. "Open a com link, USM open channel."

"Belay that," said Captain Adanama, rising to his feet. "Remain quiet. Open no channels, no communications."

Lt. Berkle glanced back at him, surprised. "Yes, sir."

"Move in to fifty thousand kilometers. Try to spot the Ishimura."

"Sir," said the navigator, "We'll be flying unidentified into an area with what could be a _USM _patrol ship active. And we're bugged not to identify as—"

"I'm well aware of that, lieutenant," said Captain Adanama Chen. "Do it now."

"Sir," said Cpl. Maywell, when he was quite sure the Captain was finished speaking, "_USM Valor_ shows as a frigate registered with Section I5. All information classified."

Harmony glanced over at Maywell. His lips were compressed into a tight line. As always, his blue eyes showed no expression whatsoever.

Adanama said nothing. Harmony knew he wanted to say something—probably to curse. That was usually how it felt.

The _Ukiyo _sped silently through space, entering the fringes of the debris cloud. They wove between giant chunks of rock, spinning in nothing.

"Sir," said the navigator, "I'm picking up another signal. It's faint, a lot fainter than either of the others, and a lot further away. Looks like it might be around the curve of the planet."

"Can you identify it?"

"Checking, sir." Lt. Gerald frowned at his graphics. "Keys as USG _Ishimura_ Executive Shuttle 09. It's named _Harmina, _sir."

"What's the range?"

"About half a million kilometers," said Lt. Gerald. "Hang one, sir. Long range scan on the Ishimura coming up." Then, with a change of tone, "Oh, wow."

"Report," said the captain.

"I'm reading massive damage to the Ishimura, sir. It appears something crashed into the main cargo hold. One minute." He tapped glowing blue keys in the air and a magnified picture leapt up on his half of the cabin screen, extrapolated from the information still sifting through the _Ukiyo_'s computers. It showed the _Ishimura _hung in the middle of gray nothing. Pieces of the ship the scan had not reached were fuzzed in blue but most was quite clear.

Harmony took it in. Not being too familiar with the exterior layouts of planetcrackers, she couldn't see all that much wrong with it from this distance…except the back end, thrusters and all, of a large ship protruding from the Ishimura's open cargo bay. Bits of wreckage still drifted from within.

Captain Adanama did not curse—he physically restrained himself from doing so. "What's the status of the rest of the ship?"

"Their com array appears to be functioning sir. I can see several spots that are probably meteor strikes. That might mean the ADS is inoperable, but it doesn't look like they've got any other meteor damage." Another picture danced up on the screen, "Engines are functioning. They're in a stable orbit as of now. From this I'd say there's more damage, but not visible externally."

"Open a com channel, civilian regular," said Adanama. Behind him, the eight marines neither spoke nor moved.

"Open," said the lieutenant.

"USG Ishimura, USG Ishimura, this is CEC repair ship _Ukiyo_ , responding to your distress signal. Please respond."

Silence. The captain repeated, in exactly the same tone.

Nothing. Captain Adanama sighed. "Take us in to ten thousand kilometers. Query the dock computer and see if it's functional."

"Aye sir." The _Ukiyo_ glided forward.

It takes time to travel forty thousand kilometers. Harmony and the others had little more to do than wait. So they did. Even from closer all Harmony could see was more black space.

"Sir," said the navigator, "it looks like one of the autoguiders from bay one is nonfunctional. I've also got no response from any docking equipment inside bay one itself."

"Bay two?"

"Looks good, sir. Empty and functional."

Captain Adanama thought. Then, "Take us in, lieutenant. Nice and slow."

"Sir." The lieutenant's hands danced over his console. They eased forward. "Autodock is querying us."

"Can you plot a manual dock?"

The navigator paused. "Manual, no sir. But you mean from our computers, without their assistance?"

"Yes. Do so."

"Yes, sir." He went to work. After a full minute he said, "Kerry, check these." He flipped a series of computations across their stations.

The lieutenant ran a math check. "They're good. Sir?"

"Go ahead," said Adanama.

Under their own power, they slid forward, between the massive pylons that lined the flanks of the _Ishimura_.

"Opening the bay doors," said the lieutenant.

They slid open. The _Ukiyo_ drifted inside.

"May I dock us automatically now, sir?"

"Go ahead."

The shuttle nudged down into its slip, the lefthand of the two the _Ishimura_ had. Looking out the starboard bow window, Harmony caught a glimpse of wreckage littering the other bay.

"We're down," said the lieutenant, and almost immediately Adanama said, "Sgt. Major, secure the shuttle bay."

Pitwell turned to his marines. He did not even have to command. He simply nodded. As their restraints released and snapped back into their seats, the seven marines rose. Harmony would have liked to stretch, but they'd all stretched before they went back down before the end of shock. No time for it now anyway.

The starboard hatch slid up and they poured out onto the long walkway that led down to the flight lounge. Harmony checked right, back toward the bay door. Clear. She swept the area briefly, getting her bearings, by which time the Sgt. Major had emerged, followed by the Captain.

Nothing moved in the docking bay, not even the air, it seemed. Over the exits into the flight lounge hung enormous screens, probably put their to welcome visitors with loud announcements. The righthand bay screen was cracked and blackened. The other just wasn't on. Harmony's suit ears picked up nothing but the scrape of their boots on steel.

"First Squad, up to the flight lounge," came Pitwell's calm voice in her earpieces. Sgt. Nelson, Cpl. Card, Cpl. Maywell, and Cpl. Williams—Harmony—moved up, while the other three marines stayed by the ship.

"Second squad, take watch on the shuttle." The Sgt. Major didn't have to remind them how important that shuttle was.

Pitwell went with 1st up toward the flight lounge. He went before and just a little to the side of Captain Adanama. In this mission, at least until the Captain said otherwise, the Sgt. Major was there more to protect him than to give orders. Except the Captain seemed more than happy to let him give them anyway.

By the time they got down there, 1st squad had already checked the antechamber. Card and Maywell stood to either side of the open, ruined door. Harmony and the Sgt. crouched before it, sweeping the room.

It was empty of life. Bags, suitcases and the minutiae of life lay scattered across the floor. Several had burst open, spilling clothes and datapads across the floor. The floor and walls were also visibly smeared with dried blood. Harmony didn't need any analyzer for that. She'd seen it too often before. Two huge smears, as if bodies had been dragged while pinned to the floor, leading in no particular direction. Then there was the other, the black fluid smeared across the lefthand side of the room—not any sort of blood she'd seen before.

It was at that moment that Harmony became aware of the noise inside her head. She'd been hearing it for awhile but had been focused, intent on the job. Now that she let her mind open a bit, she caught it full-force. She drew in her breath sharply and took a step back.

_Whispering._

Sgt. Major Pitwell had also seen the flight lounge. "Fall back by twos to the shuttle, now," he said, and went with Adanama straight backward.

No one else hesitated. Stepping backward slowly, keeping an eye on the railings to either side and the marines to their right and left, Squad One went straight back the way they had come. Harmony fought the impulse to slap herself upside the head to shut out the whispering. It got fainter as they gained distance until at the _Ukiyo_ it was a dull murmur in her head.

"Sir," said Pitwell. "May I suggest you return to the shuttle and don your armor?" It was phrased as a question. Harmony wondered what Pitwell would do if the Captain didn't shut up and move.

"I think that's an excellent idea," said Adanama. He paused. "All personnel are confirmed to fire in self defensive on my authorization from this point forward." He disappeared up the walkway into the shuttle. The marines stayed right there, some crouched, some aiming over. The marines in Squad Two had switched from covering everywhere to covering the rear hemisphere once Squad One returned.

"You now have authorization to open fire in a defensive manner if need be," said the Sgt. Major. Harmony knew his formal tones came from some textbook, one he'd memorized because he'd been in three times as long as anyone else—and it was better to be formal if it all ended up in court.

"Sir?" came the voice of Pvt. Deluna, the third woman on the team and part of Squad Two. "What happened?"

"Stow it," said Pitwell. "You'll know when the Captain's finished. Keep your eyes out." He held his massive rifle—was it a rifle?—at the ready. With armor/weapon synchronization there really wasn't any need to look down the sights, but Pitwell was using the telescopic reflex sight on his to scan the front half of the shuttle bay. "Imugi and Williams, get inside and check on the Captain."

Harmony pulled back, dropping her shotgun to low ready, turned, and hurried up the gangplank. She and Imugi—a short, stocky man of African descent—found Captain Adanama in the rear cargo compartment, slipping into his powered armor. He looked up as they approached. His eyes flickered to her name. "Williams," he said, "Good. Imugi, watch the door if you would please." He slipped his helmet on and linked it with the rest of his armor, then linked _that_ with his RIG that now lay under the armor. There was a click in Harmony's helmet, then Adanama's voice over a separate secure com channel.

"Well, Williams? What do you think?"

She stood still, wondering what he meant. "Sir?"

"You picked up something there. I saw you jerk. What was it?"

She cleared her helmet's visor. Adanama did as well. They stared at each other. "Sir, I don't know that you're authorized to—"

"I was briefed on you before we left Sol, Corporal. You were specifically requested for this mission and I was given all relevant details. I asked you a question. What did you feel?"

She paused. "Strange, sir. It's not really describable. But I can hear this weird…whispering in my head. Lots of voices. No words I can make out. I don't even know if it's a language. It was worse down by the flight lounge."

Adanama stood still. She could see him looking at her, wondering if she was telling him everything—and now she knew that he knew she knew he was wondering that.

"You don't seem very shaken."

Harmony shrugged. "Well, sir, it looks like things went bad here. How bad I guess we'll find out." There were other things, of course, but they weren't relevant—they were just her emotions, not anything she'd gotten from elsewhere.

"God's truth," said Adanama, and picked up his own weapon—a twin to her automatic shotgun. "Well—"

Twin hammering bursts of gunfire from outside. Harmony spun toward the noise. "Out!" barked Adanama, shoving at her. She ran for the hatchway.

Sgt. Major Pitwell first felt the shock of the bullets. It was Nelson and Card, the squad Sgt. and a corporal, both focused down the long walkway. They'd fired a burst apiece from what, half a millennia before, would have been squad operated automatic rifles. Even as he felt their rush of displayed air and then the conducted boom through the soles of his boots he was swinging his gun down the twenty degrees of wall that remained to bring it to bear on—

A thing. An amalgamation of what looked like dead flesh, fifteen feet high and as wide as the walkway. It moved on two huge, stubby limbs and powered itself forward with two longer, upper limbs, like a gigantic jigsaw gorilla. Thick plates of cartilage or bone covered it virtually from head to foot except for the gleaming eyes on its outthrust, triangular head. Below the eyes lay a gaping black hole dripping with more flesh. In the space of the two bursts it had moved from the flight lounge down ten meters of the boarding way. The sights of Pitwell's AGL drifted over onto the thing. The nothing behind his eyes never changed.

Pitwell squeezed the trigger.

Harmony ignored the ramp, jumping from the doorway of the shuttle down to the boarding way, simultaneously turning toward the gunfire. She hit the ground, staring left at the thing bearing down on the squad, as Pitwell's first three-round burst took it in the right leg.

There was a soundless triple flash—Harmony's suit ears completely blocking out the sound of the explosions. The thing, four tons of what looked like dead tissue, pitched sideways, off balance from trying to run on a leg that was now so much ripped meat and bone. It had made no sound before—barely a whisper as it moved—but now it bellowed. Harmony's suit ears shut off again as the roar hit sixty decibels. It lunged forward, moving now on three limbs and almost as fast as it had been. The other marines were firing, bolts of copper plasma and shotguns shells blowing pieces out of the thing. Pitwell fired another three-round burst and its right front limb blew apart this time. It was close enough that the concussion of the triple explosion rocked the marines, and a mist of vaporized fluid settled over them.

Harmony risked a glance over at Captain Adanama, who still stood in the shuttle's doorway—crouched there, as far out of the way as possible. Good. This wasn't his place.

Two and a half seconds had passed since Pitwell first fired.

Off balance and stumbling, the thing reeled sideways, hit the railing, bent it, and went over in a roaring rush. It fell twenty meters to the bay floor. Its impact sent shudders through the entire bay.

"Nelson, grenade that thing," said Pitwell, scanning the bay. Sgt. Nelson pulled a fist-sized smooth ovoid from her suit webbing. Despite six centuries of technological progress it still had a pin. She pulled it and dropped it over the side. "Down," said Pitwell, calm as rock.

The world went silent and white for a brief moment. The floor rumbled. When it ended the thing's roars had stopped. Harmony looked over the side. The grenade had spread pieces of the thing across twenty meters of floor.

Then Harmony's brain came back to the world, out of the null-space of combat and she heard Cpl. Card up at the front. _Shit, oh, shit_, it came, _Oh, god, oh fuck that thing was huge—_

Harmony blotted it out, reFocusing on the task at hand. Sgt. Major Pitwell finished his scan, assured himself that the people who were supposed to be watching were watching, then turned to regard Adanama, who still stood in the shuttle doorway. "I believe we have a hostile situation sir. May I regard our respond with force orders remanded to the norm from this point on?"

Faintly, Harmony heard Adanama thinking pretty much what Card was thinking, just now. Still partway in the nothing, she almost found it funny.

"You may, Pitwell. Adanama surveyed the blasted creature down on the floor of the bay. It had gotten within ten meters of the shuttle. "I think, however, that we've stepped into something somewhat outside of regulations, too."

Harmony looked at Pitwell, expecting him to say something, at least inside his head, but nothing came. He remained a shiny black mask. "Yes, sir. Are we proceeding with the mission?"

Adanama came down the gangplank from the _Ukiyo_. "We are revising the mission. Priority one is to maintain our exit platform. Priority two is discover what the hell's going on."

He might have gone on. Harmony never found out. A red symbol flashed in the corner of her helmet visor and her boots clamped down to the deck. From all around—except Pitwell, she noted—came startled _what the fuck_s as the other marines gravity boots activated as well.

Adanama frowned at the floor. "Gravity just went down. No warnings. That's weird."

"Sir, someone shut it off," said Pitwell. He peered over at the flight control room, an opaque gray wall at this distance. "Someone in there."

Corporal Harmony Williams, now entirely off the adrenaline rush of combat, was beginning to feel very strange. The whispers were back, not as strong, but stronger than they had been before here. And they were getting stronger.

"Sir," she said, cutting in on their conversation. "I think we'd better do something right now, whatever it is."

"What is it Corporal?"

"Whispering sir. Stronger now."

There was a metallic clatter. A pipe, perhaps, a tool falling off of something. Harmony looked that direction and saw the massive ventilation ducts that brought air into the shuttle bay, directly above their current position. The fans were working, but there was something wrong with their motion. Something weird.

"How so?"

Harmony flicked her gaze downward, now angry. If he wanted her advice, he should know how it came. What the fuck was she supposed to say—contacts _that_ way, because I just know it, sir? Didn't he know it didn't work that way—she was on the verge of saying something when the ventilation fans and their grilles blew out of the ceiling in a starburst shower of metal and a massive, slimy cephalopod-like tentacle reached out of the ceiling.

_Oh, fuck,_ she heard from someone—Imugi, most likely—then the tentacle came down across their position. She saw that it had doubled up so that a thicker portion was aimed down toward them. She flicked off the gravity in her boots and jumped sideways, pinwheeling through the air out toward the closed shuttle bay doors. In kaleidoscopic moments she saw the other marines. Their FOF tags identified them as green names on her visor but she saw only them, the black suits also scattering from the point of impact. The tentacle sliced down across the walkway, a foot over the deck, demolishing one railing before it struck Cpl. Card across the length of his body, hurling him backward into the starboard side of the _Ukiyo_. Then it took out the other side of the railing and struck him as he rebounded off of it, slamming him straight back into the hull. She felt what seemed to be a lightning strike inside her head as his thought—drenched in agony and filled with a fear only known in the last second of life—hit her. She rocked backward, changing her course, and lost sight of his flattened body as the tentacle unfolded, curling part of itself around the _Ukiyo_.

Still spinning, she saw another black suited figure flying backward, legs tucked under it, rifle tucked into his shoulder. Blooms of flame spurted from the muzzle. It was Pitwell—the damned Sgt. Major, firing even now. He wasn't going to hit anything, not in zero-g. Every shot spun him off target, but at least he was shooting. She spun again, bringing her back to the _Ukiyo_. The tentacle had wrapped around it entirely. Blooms of fire stitched across the far wall as Pitwell's shots went off target. She wondered what the pilots thought about this—back in that non-world where death is funny—then the tentacle jerked up, tearing the gangplank off of the boarding way. It pulled the entire ship backward, then drove it forward like a battering ram into the catwalks and the front windows of flight control. The oddity of it came with the noise—this was not vacuum. The crash and squeal of metal, the grinding and shattering of the shatter-proof military crystal viewport. She heard no human sounds and hoped they'd died fast.

Then another tentacle snaked its way out of the ceiling, shoving aside the other and ripping off a long, ribbon-like strand of itself against the jagged ventilation grille, and Harmony Williams left off thinking about others for the time being. She caught sight of a projectile—that was how her mind thought of it, in that brief second—then it hit her. Part of the grille from the ventilation port, three hundred pounds of metal. It kept going. She spun off in another crazy spiral, trying not to breathe as pain flared in her right side. Another black suit shot past her—Adanama, moving faster than her. The second tentacle came after him, snaking along through the air. It brushed her aside and she saw that there were little yellow nodules scattered every few feet along its length—faceted things that reminded her of bees eyes.

It whipped about and grabbed Adanama by his right leg, jerking him backward. Unfocused, Harmony heard him scream inside and outside her head—the com channel was still open—then warnings from his suit of structural damage. The tentacle, narrowed at the tip to about four inches, tightened itself into rings around his leg and twisted. At the same time it swung through the air, coming at her. It missed, passing within inches, then let Adanama go—flung him toward the far wall of the bay like a missile.

Still spinning, Harmony smashed into the righthand wall of the shuttle bay. One boot locked on, then the other. She shoved herself up.

Andama's com channel shut off with a _click_. Sgt. Major Pitwell's voice filled her ears. "All units retreat from the shuttle bay and find cover. Regroup later."

Harmony saw a ventilation duct, smaller than the others, on the wall less than twenty feet from where she stood. She jogged toward it, shotgun swinging lazy arcs from its strap. One of the tentacles smashed down a hundred yards behind her, sending shuddes through the wall. Glancing back, she saw an arm, encased in black armor, trailing blood, floating toward her. The tentacle heaved up, retracting into the ceiling, then came around toward her like a headless snake. One side of it was red and raw where it had scraped against the grillwork.

Harmony grabbed a grenade off of her suit, primed it, and threw it into the ventilation hatch, throwing herself as flat to the floor as possible. Her boots anchored her, and the magnetic strip on the side of her shotgun pinned that as well.

The world went white and silent, but thunder shook her. When her visor cleared a moment later, the ventilation grill lay blow apart, some pieces glowing with transferred heat—a small crater in the wall of the shuttle bay.

A questing tentacle tip touched her foot. Harmony flicked her boots off, pushed off with her left hand toward the vent shaft, and spinning upright relative to the wall she opened fire on the thing. Her shells exploded on contact, blowing spurts of tissue and blood into the air. The tentacle recoiled and the back of her head hit the edge of the ventilator crater. Turning, leaving behind the tentacle, the bay, and whoever remained of USMCSF Squad 15b, she scrambled into the guts of the _Ishimura._

Behind her, Captain Adanama hit the far wall with a crack audible across the entire bay. He hung there, turning slowly, one leg bent backward at the knee.

((A))

A/N: Welcome to the _Ishimura, _leathernecks.

plot= boring. Much more interesting is a story about people and events that occur. Like life. That's what this is intended to be. Vagueness is wonderful…did you really expect me to make it plain in three chapters?

To those of you versed in military science fiction, I'm borrowing several things from David Drake. Maybe you'll figure them out at some point—they're mostly about the technology.

As for Harmony Williams, she's got a number of separate origins. Her name is a tribute to a character in one of Haldemann's novels.

K. Stramin

(c.11)


	5. Voices

5

Voices

_What goes up._

_ Must come down._

((A))

_Make us whole again._

The words drift like a hallucination inside my head, somewhere just behind my eyes. Nicole said that. She said it over and over. That was the Marker talking through its puppet, through whatever it was that it had made to convince me Nicole was there. And she hadn't been.

But Kyne said that too. Was he being messed with? Of course he was…

Yet there was that point, when I stepped out of an elevator on the lower levels of the bridge, and found one of them—without the razored arms but quite obviously not alive—standing there. And he'd said the same words to me.

Who had made that hallucination of Nicole? The Hive Mind in whatever twisted ESP it had, or the Marker? Or both?

The Hive Mind hadn't wanted the Marker returned. Its efforts on the route through the colony, through all those damned blast doors, had made that clear. So…why?

Or was I reading too much into it, spurred on by no sleep, exhaustion, and methamphetamine?

It's better than glaring at the singularity core lying on the bench before me. It might be functional, it might not. I'm not going to crack the casing to find out—not here. The heart of a singularity core is in essence a micro-black hole. Left unplugged from a power source—as this thing had been for ten hours—they quickly grow unstable. Even if it wasn't unstable, popping the casing on a black hole in the cargo bay is…unwise.

I need to go back to the _Ishimura. _Even Engineering there isn't designed to repair a full-sized singularity core, like the one buried in the _Ishimura's_ guts, but with all those tools I could at least jerry-rig the core to function long enough to get…somewhere.

The cargo bay isn't designed for transporting singularity cores but there are several lead-lined cargo pallets for transporting other radioactive substances. I shove the core into one of them and shut it, then pick up my pulse rifle and make my way past the med bay and back up to the cockpit.

The pulse rifle registers 43 shots remaining. My plasma cutter has nine left in this charge and then another full one. Not much ammunition. Certainly not enough to deal with more than one or two of the things.

_ Where the hell were _they_, anyway…_there isn't time to think about that. I'll probably find out, but right now…ammunition. The nearest store on the _Ishimura_—the stores that Kendra hacked to allow access to otherwise restricted equipment—is down in the tram station below the shuttle bay. I can reload there, the next time I go there.

I check the list I made before getting Nicole's RIG and find I've deviated. I should have gone and found Nicole before coming back here but…

Here is the only possible way out of this hell. I'm not taking chances with the _Harmina_. Not any more than I have to. But now I can't just find Nicole, wherever she is, and get her to work on Kendra, because the shock drive is nonfunctional. I add that point to the list. _5.5: Fix shock drive. (eng.)_

Nicole's RIG lies in the copilot's seat. I pick it up. I still have my whole suit on and so can't feel the smooth coolness of the metal, the ridges which indicate to outside observers where the spinous processes of each vertebrae lie. In low power, it doesn't display any of the green status lights that indicate spinal damage or system failure.

I don't know how to find her. Someone unhooked her from the RIG, or the RIG from her, and somehow the RIG ended up in crew quarters, under a blanket. A damned demonic blanket. That someone had to have medical authorization to remove the RIG or else the RIG would have sent out a warning.

I hook a cable back into the RIG's port and re-read the last status reports. At _1520_ five days ago, Nicole's automated emergency life support was at 60% and functioning. Three minutes later…

_1523.12.43: RIG disconnect(auth/emer/med/145545)_

Still staring at the glowing numbers on my forearm screen, I reach over and tap into the _Ishimura's_ database again. I don't know what the emergency authentication code there means—a person, an action, a rationale for disconnecting a RIG?—but I plug the entire line into the _Ishimura's_ search directory. And wait. The Ishimura's computers contain billions of lines of code, much of it hidden from me. It's going to take awhile.

Then I flip on my communications archive and open Nicole's message. I knew I was going to have to do this again. I've known since I decided to find her, or…what's left of her. The first time I was too shocked to pay attention to anything but her…and the second was to convince myself she was dead. I never looked at the room behind her, and if anything except her RIG might give me a clue as to where she was then, it's this little taped slice of insanity.

_Why? Why did you do it? You never cared about the Unis, Nicole. You were medicine, healing…life. Why the hell would you kill yourself?_

The blank green "engage" button glows up at me from my keypad. Feeling sick to my stomach, I punch it.

Static. Hissing, crackling. Electronic noise. A picture—taken from a personal camera, maybe hers, at first sideways, showing—shelves? A floor? All in black and white. Then she comes onscreen.

If this was made five days ago, the _Ishimura_ was still in the midst of a bloody mutiny caused by its former crew. But Nicole doesn't look disheveled. She looks relatively calm, actually. The hair which, in another life, had been long and bound back is now short. How things change.

"_Isaac…_

It's difficult, very difficult, not to focus on her face. It was like that before, sometimes. She'd talk and there was this fixation, like what she was saying was the absolute most important thing in the world at that moment.

"_It's me. I wish I could talk to you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry about everything." _Her voice, calm at first, is showing wear. "_I wish I could just…talk to someone. It's all falling apart here, I can't believe what's happening._

_It's strange…such a little thing."_

A blur of static. Not a camera. A desktop monitor, something capable of picking up interference. Plenty of it around with systems failing.

Then—I force myself to keep my eyes open. There is an emptiness inside of me, a dead space where nothing seems to live. Nicole keeps talking. I take my eyes off of her and look at the room behind her, using the pretext of a search to block my eyes from the message I can't help but hear.

"_In the end it all comes down this one little thing."_

The syringe. Tiny there, in her hand, almost featureless but for the black splotch of a label. She holds it like a dagger.

"_I didn't want it to end like this. I really wanted to see you again…just once."_

She's staring straight at me. I have the feeling that if I move, her eyes will follow mine. Look at the room, Isaac. Not at her, not at her hand, look at the room. What's in the room.

"_I loved you. I always…loved you."_

_Then what changed, Nicole?_

The room behind Nicole is some kind of storage room. Shelves line the wall on the left. Behind Nicole as she—oh, god—sags sideways and falls—is a viewscreen, on the far wall of this room.

I freeze the image. Nicole's eyes are closed. The syringe is in midair, falling from her hand. There is a door in the far righthand corner. The shelves hold various items. I zoom in on them.

There are sealed packages, wrapped in perforated cloth—sterile instrument packages. There are other wrapped packages—electronic implements of some sort, calipers or disposable oxygen generators and the like. The only places there are medical storage rooms are near the medical deck.

The syringe catches my eye. I zoom in on it as well. The image quality could be better—it was not a high resolution transmission, and I'm not really good with the photographic sections of my RIG. I scroll backward through the transmission. The syringe flies back up to Nicole's hand. She straightens up. Her eyes open. The syringe moves backward—I freeze it again.

The syringe is in motion, toward Nicole's arm, in that damned little precise jab. The white script is blurry, I can't make it out. What does it matter anyway? Whatever it was, it was something deadly. Nicole knew what to give herself if she wanted to die.

But…medical storage. That's a small enough area to look through. If she stayed there. But if she did, how did her RIG get into the crew quarters?

I don't know the answer to that. But this video was recorded somewhere on the medical deck.

Is that a good enough reason to go back?

My RIG beeps at me. The code search for that line of code is finished. Leaving that frozen image of Nicole and the syringe, I switch back to the search—to be confronted with a whole page of code lines. Not ships systems code, but event monitoring—a record, in effect, of everything that happens on the Ishimura, but unorganized by anything but time of occurrence.

→_05062504181447(auth/emer/med/cso/145545/11152503/renew=3, access=1, checkrig=1 status=0)_

Kendra is the person who deals with computer code. My department is levers and switches, the external trappings of the computer systems. The first string of number is the time the entry was logged, the time it happened. The rest is mostly a mystery. Emergency authorization—medical in nature, then something, then an authorization number, and maybe a renewal time. This is the computer's shorthand version of the emergency certification of whoever jacked Nicole's RIG. Doesn't help unless I can understand it. If Kendra were awake and willing she might help but with an ET tube down her throat she wouldn't be talking much anyway.

A little bit of the weight that left my shoulders when I decided all this at the beginning drops back onto me. It gets just a little more difficult to breathe. I will have to go back, back to medical, and search every single damned storage room for clues. If they're still there, after five days.

Then I become aware of a little blinking green light on the console. I still have the subsection devoted to _Ishimura _communications open. It's signaling a new message received, origin…

I tap it open.

"_USG Ishimura, USG Ishimura, this is CEC repair ship Ukiyo , responding to your distress signal. Please respond."_

For a minute I sit and gape at the com screen. _Another_ repair ship. I was on the first damned repair ship. When CEC sent the first one, and there was still no response from the _Ishimura_, they should have launched something more capable than a repair shuttle. Regulations, followed implicitly in cases like these because of lawsuits, stated that a single repair shuttle was to be sent. If the shuttle did not succeed, a full-scale rescue mission was to be launched.

Something didn't sound right here. I tap through the message. It was received forty-five minutes ago, when I was still back with the singularity core. It had come…

The _Harmina_'s sensors don't reach far enough to find out where this _Ukiyo_ had come from. But…

I can well enough guess. Those damned fools, whoever they were, had sailed right into the _Ishimura_. They'd probably crashed just like we had that first time.

But some of them might still be alive. For awhile, at least. Maybe longer, considering the scarcity of those deathless things on my last visit.

_Course confirmed_.

I punch the _Harmina_ up to maximum thrust. It shoves me back in my seat. Nicole's RIG, forgotten on the console, slides off and clatters into the depths of the cockpit. The engines, previously almost silent, now roar like some caged animal somewhere behind me. I jam my pulse rifle barrel between my left arm and side hoping I don't jostle the trigger, and pound at the com panel with my other hand.

"USG _Ukiyo_, USG _Ukiyo_, this is Isaac Clark on the USG _Harmina_. Do not enter the launch bay on the _Ishimura_. Do you understand? Do not enter the launch bay!" There is a chance, however small, they haven't reached the ship yet. If there was a God I'd pray to him but here, on what seems the edge of existence, we stand forgotten.

"Do not enter the _Ishimura_. _Ukiyo_, do you understand?"

Without hyperlight communications it will take time for my message to reach where they might be. A substantial portion of the roiling atmosphere of Aegis VII lies between us as well, meaning the message might not even reach them.

This part of Aegis looks relatively untouched. It's a small planet, but a thousand miles away from even the largest earthquake, people don't notice much. The devastation lies a quarter of the way around the curve.

There. A transponder, coded for the _Ukiyo_. It's active, which means only that the hardened case containing the transponder is still functional. I punch up the _Harmina_'s limited long range scopes, but at this distance there's nothing but more stars. ETA at this thrust, plus deceleration so I don't run into the _Ishimura_, is twenty two minutes.

There is nothing to do but wait. Wait and think. Think about what to do when I get there. Think about how to look for Nicole. Think…about what to do if I do find her, and she's dead.

I don't know if I'll be able to stand that. Seeing her trying to kill herself was bad enough. In the last several hours I've gotten some sleep and not been forced to watch behind my back with every single step. This all meaning that I'm not quite as stressed as I was before…

But before, I was a nervous wreck. Might be worse next time.

Com pings me, telling me that my message has reached the coordinates I sent it to. There will be time while they think how to respond, and then more transmission delay, if they don't respond immediately. Not very long. Half a minute, maybe. If they're there.

I open my RIG and check down the list I've made. Were it in archaic pencil, there would be slashes and scribbles where I'd noted various things, but in the text of my RIG, it's all clean and simple. Ha. Nothing about this, or anything else I'm planning to do, will be simple.

I revise the initial list, jotting needed things down in a not necessarily chronological order.

1. Find Ukiyo (shuttle bay?)

2. Fix singularity core (eng.)

3. Find Nicole.

4. Fix Kendra

5. Leave.

Nice. Neat. Uncomplicated.

The dull roar of the engines shuts off suddenly. Then the shuttle's belly jets rotate the ship, pointing it backward in relation to our destination, and light up again to decelerate. I could decelerate with forward maneuvering jets, but they wouldn't stop us in time, not going this fast.

I hope nobody else onboard the _Ishimura_ messed with the shuttle. A nicked fuel line, a bug planted somewhere in the computer. It doesn't take much to sabotage something as complex as this.

Long-range scopes can see the _Ishimura_ now, a jagged blot of blackness against the stars. No one has picked up on the _Ukiyo_'s com line. Either they're debating whether to answer this weird ship that's just blasted toward them at four gravities, or they've gone into the belly of the beast and aren't really concerned about the com channels right now.

Every tick of my RIG's chronometer seems to echo with a heartbeat, though my heart rate is still significantly higher than the clock goes. I have very little ammunition. I have no idea where this other shuttle is…

And it doesn't matter. Amazingly, it doesn't matter. The thought, the transmission from another human voice, another living human voice, has disrupted all my dismal thought processes. There was someone alive, fifty five minutes ago, other than me in this system. Some man, with the faintest hint of an accent in his speech. Cool, calm. Reminded me, if only in the words, of that nameless corporal who'd sent our initial broadcast on the _Kellion_.

The _Harmina_'s engines die and the jets rotate me back around. The _Ishimura_ hangs in space, less than ten thousand kilometers away. Too close for full thrust, at least with this very valuable ship. I edge in, wondering what I'm going to find in that damned shuttle bay.

I'm afraid. God knows I am afraid, but it's not enough. My fingers did not hesitate this time. I never went into psychology—a science dominated nowadays by those damned Unis—but there's enough self-analyzing going on to recognize…the chance, even the _chance_, of there being other people alive—and another ship!—is enough to get me moving.

It's like a jolt of refine adrenaline, but slow in coming. I know I'm mostly running off of the stuff, now. That and the amphetamine, and maybe the coffee. It'd probably be good to eat something, but I don't have time. There's one more thing I need to do, something I should have done before I even went back to the _Ishimura_ the first time.

I go back, past the med bay, to the cargo bay. Even as an "executive" shuttle, the _Harmina_ had extraneous space. CEC doesn't like extraneous space, and so they put in a spacious—for a shuttle—cargo bay. Then engineers like me filled it full of various stuff to use when all the other shuttles stop working and we have to use the one functional one to go outside and fix the ship.

I walk past rows of crates as high as my waist, shiny steel cubes holding spare parts, batteries, reels of cable, photovoltaic cells with their titanium backing, Then…

A single crate. Inside, dull gray rectangles a foot by a foot. I prize one open and find a reel of molecular wire. It's a misnomer—the wire itself is about twenty molecules across, but functionally there's no difference. It's used in reels in gravity tether construction and countless other projects because there is no more efficient thing for holding a couple tons. Of course, it's also dangerous—run into a line of monowire hung at waist-level and you won't live long enough to say oops. There have been incidents. It's been used in various assassinations, and it's hard to deal with at any time because you can't actually see it. It's not ferrous and doesn't register as a metal—it's a polymer. That's why it's so effective with assassinations. Accidental suicides, they're called.

Each reel has three bright orange tabs, and also in the crate is a box of similar tabs. The first tab marks the beginning of the reel, the third the end. The middle tab shows where you want to cut the thing. I don't know what the cutting tab is made of—true monomolecular wire, maybe—but it works.

I shear off a three-foot length of the stuff. Holding it, very carefully, by its two tabs, I set it down on a workbench and then go get a hacksaw. That design has stayed unchanged for centuries, despite advances in materials. The tabs on the wire are sticky as well—I peel off white backing, then wrap the sticky portion around one end of the hacksaw, then do the same with the other. When I'm finished I'm left with a hacksaw without a blade. Except hung between the arms, right where there the blade should be, was my wire.

A nasty surprise for any of those things that get close enough. I stick it to one of the magnetic sections on my harness, taking care to keep the blade down.

That's all. All I can do right now, at least. My brain is buzzing too much to think. It's a bad thing, going into a situation like this…

But there are other people here now.

I also know I'll be lucky to get out of this with my skull intact.

((A))

A/N: Short, yes. Isaac's internal dialog is mostly about making decisions and wrestling with his own mind. But now that they're all made, it may be time for kicking some ass…a gruesome thought, considering the primary antagonists

Reviews! Yes, it was damn time. I was getting tired of myself not updating it. HotPocket, I don't know that Isaac is even _capable_ of rescuing someone—allowing that anyone is left alive. He's got enough trouble keeping himself alive. As for the rest, you'll see.

BrazeRancor…somehow, I doubt he'll be that polite. "WTF you doing here?" sounds better.

Next one should be out a little sooner—expect scene changes, chapters all in one character's perspective are done with, for now.

K. Stramin

(c. 1140 p.m.)


	6. Unintended Occurrences

6

Unintended Occurrences

_My ears are filled with the clanging of my own body armor. On elbows and knees I move, staring ahead through a visor that has begun to cloud with condensation. The world is black. I see nothing but at the edges where light from behind leaks through. With every jerk and push, I wait to feel something, against my foot, my leg, pulling me back. There are things here. I can hear them, but not with my ears. They are a presence, without sound, a pressure more akin to +n gravity, a heaviness inside my own head. This has not happened before, and I do not like it._

She'd slung her shotgun over her shoulder before she dove into the vent, but it was pointed back along the tunnel, the light under the barrel the wrong way to show anything. Corporal Harmony Williams stopped, panting, and forced herself to think. She had another light. She reached down to her armored vest and pulled out a hand-length flashlight. It had a pressure switch. She pushed it on and the vent tunnel leapt into brilliant relief.

She was encased in a steel cocoon two and a half by two and a half feet, somewhere in the guts of the ship. She brought her other arm ahead of her, twisting and jerking it to bring it past the chokepoint where her body almost met the wall, and checked her RIG chronometer. Less than half an hour had passed since she left the shuttlebay. She forced herself to breathe. In, out. She checked the built in biotelemetry. Her heart rate blipped as it slowed.

God, what had happened. She'd vanished into the haze of struggle. That part, the shuttle bay, was crystal clear because it needed to be. Because it was the sort of thing soldiers never forgot. But the flight from that place, through lightless tunnels in this damned enormous ship…she couldn't remember at all. Where was she?

She chinned her suit radio—then stopped. Protocol was different this time. Suit radio communications made inside a wireless ship like the _Ishimura_ could easily be intercepted. During the initial briefing, millennia ago in Room 26A of the carrier _Zartosht_, Captain Adanama had made that quite clear. "You identify yourselves as marines before we accomplish our purpose and we're all screwed," he'd said. Harmony had never heard a Captain speak to privates and corporals quite as direct as that. "They may resist," he said, "And even though yes, we are the law, and they are in an illegal sector, neither you, nor I, nor the brass want a bloodbath. Besides, even if it did happen it's us against a thousand pissed off CEC employees, not good odds. If at all possible, don't use the radios until we've secured…"

If at all possible. Until this mission dropped off the edge of reality. Harmony Williams put her head against the floor, relaxing a growing cramp, and thought. With the practice of years of dealing with other people's random thoughts, she forced away the terror, the anger, and the growing worry that one of those things—tentacles, whateverthehell they'd been—would snake its way in here and come up behind her—and focused on the past. On that pathetic excuse for a fight.

The tentacles—they had been _tentacles,_ Huge, mottled, a vague shade somewhere between brown and white. Harmony had seen pictures of old Earth squids and knew about the weird, dog-like things with tentacles that had been bred as experimental guards in some corporations, but nothing like this. They had burst through the grate from elsewhere, _secured_ from somewhere. Tentacles were never things of their own, they always went back to something, connected to something. And tentacles were always smaller than the thing they went back to.

_Fuck this_, she thought, feeling her pulse skyrocket again. Whatever they were, wherever they went, they were a lot bigger problem than pissing off the crew of the _Ishimura_—that is, if the crew was even alive still. Adanama was dead, and god knew where anyone else was. She chinned her radio onto the general freak.

"Anyone listening and anyone able to respond, this is Harmony Williams. Is anyone from the _Ukiyo _receiving this, over?"

_Click_. She waited. Elsewhere, far away, there came a thump and a rattle. Somewhere else in the vent system. She wished she could look behind her.

The silence stretched. Her light picked out tiny variegations in the metalwork of the vent.

_Click_. A voice, smooth as silk and used to speaking in a language more fluid than Basic.

_" Imugi here. I read you clear, over."_ His sibilant voice took the vowel off the start of his name. She noted that without any other cues, as she'd hoped, he'd picked up on her permutations of Adanama's orders. Just Harmony and Imugi, talking on the radio, not private and corporal—for the record, when it ended.

Relief pounded through her between heartbeats. "Copy that, Imugi. Where are you?"

_"No idea. A storage room, it looks like. I just came down out of a busted out vent in a wall. The place is trashed. Anyone else contacted since the shuttle bay, over?"_ Again, his voice took the harshness, turning his "over" into more of an "ova".

"Negative on that," she said, resuming her clumsy crawl through the vent. "No contact, over."

_"Any estimate of casualties, over?"_

"Card bought it. I think Adanama's dead too. The others…" She frowned. Not thinking right again. "Hold one."

She tapped at her RIG. _No signal._ "Can't reach them. Must be all this damned steel and interference. The suits can't punch through without _Ukiyo_ relaying it." As if anyone was going to go back to that damned thing just so those still alive could talk.

The radio crackled but Imugi said nothing. A hint of pity washed at her through the link.

"You've had no contact with anyone, over?"

_"Negative,"_ he said. _"But it could be we're inside too much metal. They might not be close enough. Lot of electrical interference in here too, over._"

"Confirm that, over." Interference in the radio, but the whispers were gone. They'd been gone since she came back from that place. What had they _been_, anyway? She couldn't remember what, if anything, they'd said.

_"Any ah, recommendations,, over?_"

Orders, he meant. That trained, disciplined section of her mind, isolated from the half-panic surprise brought, clicked into place. "Make contact with anyone else. And find out where we are. I'm in a ventilation shaft right now, going…somewhere. Might be awhile, over." The shaft stretched ahead like the eye of infinity.

_"Okay."_ A pause. _"Do you think anyone else is alive?"_

"You know us. We survive." It was a thousand year old mantra, but here, in this hellhole of a ventilation shaft, Harmony had a little harder time believing it.

_Click_. A symbol blinked on her display, registering a second incoming com. Ragged breathing, a distracted voice. _"Oh, fuck…corporal? You there?"_

She _knew_ that voice. "Here, Maywell. Go ahead." And he sounded scared.

_ "I just caught the—" _a grunt, a muffled, reverberant clang, as his suit com conducted his armor's impact"—_tail end of you. I'm…fuck…running away from—"_

Her radio blasted static. Harmony winced even as her suit computer dialed the volume down. _"--damned thing that came out of the wall,"_ Maywell continued. His voice was an octave higher than it should be, and he was speaking in harsh gasps. _"It's not very, fast but the fucker keeps, coming and I think there's, more of them—"_

He screamed, once—a shrill, surprised, somehow breathless scream. Behind the noise Harmony heard another muffled thud. The whispers surged inside her head, indecipherable, a background to the background of a dying marine. They weren't Basic, they weren't any language she knew. Like chanting…or…

Then Maywell's fear and pain, delayed by the unreliability of radio and her own reception, arrived. Harmony fell back inside herself. It lasted only a few seconds, the few seconds it took for Maywell to die.

Maywell's radio shut off and instantly, the whispers died. Died, that is, back to a subsonic level inside her head. _But we're still here…listening._

Harmony put her forehead against the warm padding of her suit, wishing it were cold. She was getting a headache. She chinned the com.

"Did you catch that, Imugi?"

_"Affirmative. We seem somewhat fucked."_ She could have sworn he sounded faintly amused.

"No information, private. Nothing to work with. But we won't get answers by sitting put. If Maywell made it the others probably have too. Try contact at three minute intervals as you move. But stay as quiet as you can. Whatever killed Maywell, there's more of them."

_"Roger that."_

Hollow clanging, banging, from behind her. Harmony twisted momentarily, ramming her helmet into the vent wall, forgetting she couldn't turn. Her throat closed. Her head felt light. _What is it?_ yammered a voice in her mind _what's crawlingupbehind—_

Harmony jerked herself out of mounting panic and chinned the control to the right of her radio. Her view flipped for a moment, then she was looking at the tunnel from the view of the reflex sight/recorder mounted on her shotgun, slung on her back and pointing back down the tunnel.

A huge, mottled tentacle was working its way up the tunnel toward her, ten meters away. It narrowed near the tip to a slender, finger-thick feeler, then thickened out until two meters down it didn't fit the confines of the vent shaft. So it was whipping back and forth, deforming the vent from the inside, then slithering forward, jamming itself in further.

Coming after her.

Harmony dug her elbows into the tunnel walls and her knees into the floor and dragged her armored body down the tunnel. It was a crawl never taught in basic, something more akin to a worm than a human. In her vision the tentacle drew closer, wiggling the obscene feeler back and forth, brushing the walls, then slamming back and forth, warping the steel duct.

Each drag of her elbows brought a _screech_ from the steel. Her shotgun flopped on her back, more a bother than a hindrance, but the condensation on her helmet pissed her off.

The tentacle twisted, then rammed itself forward, as the other had in the shuttle bay, compressing itself until where it emerged out of the darkness it was a pale white/brown mass of tissue, completely blocking the tunnel. The vent bobbled. Supports shattered above. Harmony scrambled forward, chinning her view back to the front. Seeing how close it was didn't help.

The tentacle's feeler brushed across the bottom of her boot. It felt rubbery. Harmony lifted her foot, then jammed it down, catching the finger-thing against her toe and the vent floor. The tentacle jerked as if stung, ripping its own sensor off.

Then all hell broke loose. She'd thought it was destroying the vent when it had actually been being _cautious_. Now it whipped back against one wall, tearing the welds and that side of the vent straight out. Then it drove forward, slamming into the outside of the vent directly beside her. It stove inward, shoving her across and pinning her against the far wall. Then the other wall smashed in. She couldn't move, pinned between the walls. The tentacle slapped again, tearing a hole through the vent wall before her.

Then the supports holding her section of vent gave out, dropping her in her cocoon out of the ceiling and out into the room she'd been crossing.

She hit like the armored body she was, ricocheting off something hard and curved, slamming feet-first into something else, then landing flat out, still pinned by the vent. It blew the breath from her and drove a bent section of the vent into her abdominal armor. She lay there, trying to gasp.

Sound had gone from the world. She could feel vibrations as the tentacle moved, and the rubbing of her own armor against the ground, but nothing came from her helmet speakers. Shorted out?

The world was a blur of red and black, with flashes of yellow where her shotgun light reflected off the vent. There was no sound but a harsh wheezing—either she'd lost her hearing, or the systems in her helmet had shorted out. The vent was open before her. Harmony tried to move. Both legs did, then hit steel within a few inches. Her right arm was free in front of her, fully extended. The other was jammed into her ribs by a steel plate.

The ragged edge of the vent shaft caught her eye. She reached for it, got three fingers around it—the fourth didn't want to bend, for some reason—and yanked. She slid forward an inch. Another yank. A pause, to catch her breath. Not too deep. The piece that'd hit her in the shuttle bay had cracked one, maybe two ribs. No need to breathe too deep. _Easy. It might be coming after me, but I can't do a damned thing till I'm out of this coffin._

Working more off of instinct than rational thought, Harmony worked her way out of the section of vent. Her right arm popped free and immediately started hurting. She reached forward with both and dragged herself out, rolling over onto her back and gasping for breath, staring up at the ceiling.

The tentacle had continued its maniac work, demolishing the vent, mutilating itself in the process. Pale fluids and bright red blood dripped down some of the strange structures in the room. Pieces of the tentacle, from inch-thick bits to foot-long swatches of skin, littered the floor. Above, the tentacle paused, waggling its gory end as if searching for something it could neither see nor hear. She'd heard no sound, but she couldn't have made as much noise as it had bashing the ceiling apart.

Then it withdrew, with a rending, straight back into the vent shaft it had come from, leaving it a blood-tinged, flesh-draped hole. Harmony finally got her breath back.

Her finger had started hurting. It was probably broken, wouldn't be the first time. Her brain jittered, high on adrenaline and the certainty of coming greater pain. Before her feet lay her cocoon of steel, shaped about like she was where she hadn't bent it coming back out. Her shotgun lay somewhere inside, making the whole thing glow like an illuminated shroud. Harmony went down on one knee to retrieve it. The sling had abraded in two. She left it that way, no time to fix the gun if it isn't really broken, and swept the room with its mounted light.

She was in a corridor, about four feet wide, between rows of tall plastene cylinders. Each was about eight feet tall and four wide. They were an opaque white and hung from a conveyor belt that fed off into the depths of the room. They reminded her of something, but it wasn't important right now. The corridor she knelt in ran away in both directions for about twenty meters, then stopped at a steel wall with a T intersection.

Her hand hurt like hell. And her side, and her head, for that matter. Actually, pretty much everywhere hurt, but not as bad as those. She let one hand off the shotgun, its weight dipping the barrel down in her left hand as she rebooted her helmet audio software with the keypad on her left forearm. Sound came back in a rush—along with the whispers, from inside. This time, they were in Basic. She squinted, as if that would help.

_"decreased probability of…"_

A man, maybe. Not speaking quite right if it _was_ a man. And it sounded like a voice, not like the internal communication she was familiar with. Almost as if he was speaking right behind her.

_"indicates need for intensive action concerning previously investigated…"_

The same man. Harmony shook her head, trying to banish her headache but only making it worse.

"_Will determine viability upon arrival…"_

Then, aware suddenly she'd been out of her own loop and inside her head, Harmony heard a fluttering off to one side. She swung the light, finger tightening for the first shot, because whatever made that sound it—

_It_ gave her no more time to think. She got a confused glimpse of white wings, mottled and spotted, with a huge discoloration in the joint of one of them, then it hit her, bowling her over, and stabbed a needle-sharp proboscis straight down at her mouth.

((A))

Harmony shut her mouth. It was a reflex, a pointless action because her teeth and lips would prove nothing against the stabbing force of this thing's mouth. In that brief moment she tried—and failed—to prepare herself for the pain.

Then the creature's beak/mouth struck her helmet's visor and deflected off to the right. The tip scratched a line across her visor. Pinned under it, Harmony shoved and cursed as it scrabbled and beat at her with its white, floppy wings, each blow a punishment, then drew back its beak-like proboscis for another attempt. She shoved out at it, forcing it a few inches off of her, and drew her Emmy pistol from its diagonal, grip-down holster above her heart.

The first bolt of plasma struck the creature in its human head, which dangled off to one side, connected only by strings of muscle and integument. It was not an aimed shot, simply the first one she got off as the pistol came out and across from left to right. The second hit the creature at the base of its beak as it started down again.

The human head vanished in a cloud of vaporized tissue. The second shot severed the beak, continuing on into the ceiling to char a hole there far above her head. The creature lurched backward, shrieking from a mouth somewhere on its body. It waggled the jagged stump of its beak at her and she shot it again, center mass. Five more times.

It wobbled back and forth, balanced precariously on the bottom edges of its leg-like wings. It seemed more injured by the single shot to its beak than the others which had blown huge holes in its body. Blood and undidentifiable parts littered the floor. Her shots had charred holes in the opaque tube behind the thing, but it still stood. It didn't even seem to be bleeding much. Harmony glared at it, struggling to sit up, and dropping her Emmy she snatched up the shotgun. Her finger automatically checked the select-fire switch and she stroked the trigger once, twice, three times. 20mm explosive shot did what the plasma had not—the creature's upper half vanished in a messy cloud. The rest of it dropped backward, slapping and twitching.

Harmony edged away from it until she came up against the opposing row of plastene cylinders extending into the ceiling. She watched it, almost certain it would just get up, with its top half missing, and rush at her again. It did not.

She took her eyes off of it to check the shotgun. She'd emptied one of its dual magazines, leaving twenty FMJ 20mm rounds. Not much use against these things. She slapped in a fresh fragmentation magazine into the right well and slipped the empty into the spot the fresh one had occupied.

Then she checked the room. There were no more of the creatures, not visible at least. Not in this aisle, or in the spaces between others, or in the ceiling.

Harmony Williams slumped back against the container and tried to get herself under control. Instead, the whispers swirled in.

Think, damn it. There's no way to survive unless you think. These things are mutations, biological somethings. Nothing I would understand, but you can blow them apart. You—

_ "transmitting shipwide. We need more—_

Leave them off, Harmony. You can leave off others, people who are panicking or—

_ "After all, you're insane. What, you' don't believe me—"_

Silence. Let silence be, oh, shut up you goddamned voices!

_ "If you listen to _me_, I will get you out of here alive."_

The voices died, leaving an echo, a trace, of that last one. A man, attempting to be confident, but with an undercurrent of nervousness.

In their place came a massive inrushing of air, from nowhere, it seemed. It picked up little bits of the vaporized creature and whirled them into the air, then dropped them as it subsided.

Harmony got to her feet, wincing but no more.

_"Anyone listening, anyone able to respond, this is Imugi. Does anyone receive, over?"_

With the return of her own concentration came her radio. "Harmony here. Found anyone yet, Imugi?"

_ "Negative. But this is my first call since we were on."_

All of that—the vent, the tentacle, the fall, the creature—all in three minutes. It had felt like less.

"Roger that. Nevermind."

She heard him calling as she swept the room. It remained empty. Every instinct told her, demanded, that she leave here, find somewhere defensible, and remain there. It was a gut reaction, an unthinking run and hide. Such things are never easy, are sometimes impossible, to resist, but she shrugged it off. Training, and necessity. Hiding would accomplish nothing other than eventually running out of ammunition, or needing to sleep. The only solution was to find the others, get orders, or, if—god forbid—she was the senior NCO left, get them the hell off this boat.

But not by the _Ukiyo_. It might be still functional in some ways, but not as a spacegoing craft. Not now.

Abruptly, brilliant emergency lights illuminated the entire room, strobing down from above. Harmony went into a crouch, glaring everywhere at once. From somewhere in the room came the half-grinding, half-hissing of pneumatic doors engaging their seals. Then a voice from the sky, a mechanized, somewhat feminine voice, spoke from the ship itself.

_"Storage tank breach detected in cryogenic storage B1. Toxins present in the storage room. Storage room B1 has been quarantined. A repair crew has been notified."_

It fell silent, then spoke again a moment later.

_"Automatic quarantine failure in cryogenic storage B1. Threat level raised to Orange three. All available repair and rescue personnel on Deck 12 standb" _without pausing, it broke over itself "_Addendum: airflow shutdown out of cryogenic storage B1 has failed."_

Harmony ignored the voice. She went down the corridor, the Emmy recharged and back in its holster, the shotgun's light sweeping the air before her.

At the end of the corridor, a right. Ahead, one of the pneumatic doors out of here. Either the computer had failed to register it, or it had a fault, or something, but Harmony was very glad it hadn't sealed her in the room. She'd had more than enough experience with automatic lockdowns and quarantines since they became not only standard, but required, on most ships.

The idea was to minimize casualties, of course. What it also meant was that whoever was outside of the door got to watch, most of the time, as those who hadn't gotten out in time suffered. Yet it also meant that one failed system, or blown gas cylinder, did not destroy a ship.

Harmony wasn't prepared to debate morale matters. She focused on the space beyond the door, edge left, checked that section, of the corridor, then right, and the opposing space. Twice more, sweeping a further wedge beyond the door, and she slipped through. Emergency lights pulsed through the door behind her, but this corridor lay in utter blackness.

Again.

Across the way lay another open door, this one with a functioning holographic display above it. It read CRYOGENIC BAY B2—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. It was lighted, however, and so she went in. She was never certain, later, whether it was _because_ it was lighted—for, sure, the other room hadn't offered a way out of this maze, why should another cryo room—or for some other reason. Theories had been proposed and debated, about whether Focus could subconsciously influence.

The cylinders in this room were not opaque. They were clear plastene, and the three directly before her, one in each row, held examples of monsters from the darkest nightmares of humanity.

Harmony let her gun light play over them with horrified fascination. They looked vaguely human—had been human, no doubt, before whatever happened happened. The one on the right had been a woman. The one in the center had been a large man…and the on one the left had been an infant.

But they were monsters now. Bones, something like blades but also like arms, sprouts from the shoulders of the two adults. Frozen in the life-like stances quick cryo brought, their dead, frost-rimmed eyes glared out at nothing. Their mouths had mutated, somehow. Harmony couldn't tell what they were supposed to be for. The infant, on the other hand…

She closed her eyes and looked away, but the same horrified fascination drew her onward, into the row between the adults. Each cylinder she passed, each laid bare in the harshness of her light, held a creature. They were frozen, or dead, but that did not make them seem any less alive, and their expressions and the emotions frozen in their eyes conveyed a hatred beyond belief for whatever they'd been seeing when this happened.

Except for one.

Harmony almost missed it, almost turned the other way. There were too many different types, too much hatred, raised, barbed, bladed arms. It seemed a mélange of viciousness staid in time, until she turned and found herself staring at the closed eyes of

--a young woman.

An un_touched_ young woman.

She had not been frozen standing up, as the others. Her posture was relaxed, head turned sideways, arms slack at her sides, She'd been frozen lying down.

Harmony frowned. She couldn't remember what the protocol was for cryogenic storage of crew members. It was done, occasionally of course, in the military, when a particular prisoner or the rare—thankfully—deserter proved unable to tolerate the brig. But on a civilian ship, she didn't know. The woman didn't seem hurt, but that didn't mean anything.

But she was the only human here, amidst the creatures. It stopped Harmony's fascinated horror and turned her to thought.

She realized she had not heard Imugi in almost five minutes. "Imugi, do you copy?"

Leaving the woman, who would keep so long as the ship's power stayed on—if she was alive anyway—and made for the door out of Cryo B2. "Imugi, Harmony here. Answer me, damn it."

No reply. She came out fast into the corridor—no time for careful sweeps now. Left check, right check, the corridor was clear. It was only seven feet high, not intended for passage of the cryo tanks but for repair and maintenance personnel. Which meant it led somewhere where people had traveled regularly. Of course, anywhere people traveled, the things would. She moderated her steps to a quick trot, but still her boots whanged against the steel floor. "Imugi, goddamn it, answer me!"

_"I copy, Harmony."_

She stopped. "You read me?"

_ "Not for the last check. I've been trying to reach you."_

She started again, sweeping back and forth, back and forth with the gun light. "I was in the cryo storage rooms. Must be shielded."

_"Probably. I briefly made contact with Amanda Nelson—"_ she could hear the strain in his voice as he forced himself to omit the "Sergeant" part. "She is uncertain where she is as well other than somewhere within the Engineering decks."

"Any relayed instructions?"

_"Yes. Proceed to the nearest ship tram station and rendezvous at the Bridge station."_

"Are you moving?"

_ "I think I'm about a hundred yards shy of destination."_

"Roger that. Williams, out."

Was there much point in omitting their ranks and that they were part of the Corps? Other than the frozen woman in the cryo room, Harmony hadn't noticed anyone who'd care who they were or what they were doing here. Which had become uncertain since they dropped out of shock, anyway.  
The corridor ended in a lift door. She punched it open and stepped in.

According to it, she was on _medical, cryo, sublevel C._ _Medical, cryo, main_ lay three decks down. She hit the button. The lift jolted. The thing which had been lying on top of the lift jerked, writhed, and tried to come down through the ceiling.

Harmony fell back against one wall, jerking the shotgun up and opening fire on full auto. She'd switched over, so instead of disintegrating the ceiling and herself along with it, she punched maybe fifteen jagged holes in it. A screech, an inhuman scream, echoed through the lift shaft. Blood drained through one or two of the holes. The thing, whatever it was, rolled over and fell off the side of the lift. Fifteen seconds later, Harmony hit the correct level and after a quick check of the next room she stepped backward out of the lift, waiting until its doors closed so the thing wouldn't come through the floor. Her heart jittered.

Cryo control. There was no other room aboard any ship shaped specifically like this—the only ones elsewhere were gas chambers. There was a plastene-windowed control room that overlooked the cryo chamber itself. The chamber was empty, the controls on the cryo boards dimmed in low-power mode Whoever was in here last hadn't turned off his tools. Along the walls were more cryo cylinders. Harmony didn't know why such areas had been built in-maybe to cycle the frozen ones in the storage areas through where they could be easily observed—but in this particular room, they'd been used as a display rack. More of the creatures, frozen in mid-motion, glared out at her from their frosty prisons.

_"All hands, all hands_," said the impersonal voice of the _Ishimura's_ computers. "The captain is arriving. All hands, stand to. The captain is aboard." A recorded bosun's whistle shrilled over the speakers.

Harmony turned a full circle, scanning the room, wondering what that woman was talking about. There were only three doors out of the cryo room. One was locked, one she'd come from. The other led to a "biochemical laboratory CA1".

The lab was totaled. Two wall-less containers, something like stasis tanks but not, had been destroyed along the far wall. A desk, with associated analytical machinery, had been thrown halfway through one of the steel bulkheads. Harmony went through the room quickly, pausing only to check the corners where one of the things might be.

Beyond the lab, the corridors turned into a maze. Harmony followed them through, found doors sealed, doors jammed shut or jammed open. Blood stained the walls in too many places to count as if an insane, expiring artist had repeatedly dashed himself against the walls, intent on painting as many surfaces as he could before he died.

Eventually she came out into a cold, empty room, filled with the detritus of surgery and death. A trauma area, what might have once been the ER of the ship. Blood stained the floor in so many places that the ancient mop and bucket in a corner seemed mocking, somehow. Harmony kept her back against one wall. There were too many places, too many little niches behind the tables, or under them, or around the corner past the emergency oxygen masks, where things with long, blade-like arms could hide. One foot rustled a pamphlet on the floor. She caught the trailing words _"believe in truth?" _on its rust-stained cover.

Silence seemed best in this empty hall of the dead. It was not the largest room she'd encountered, but, for some reason, it seemed—

_"Harmony?"_

She chinned her com. "What?" Eyes toward the corners. Movement? No. They wouldn't be able to hear anything, anyway. She was making more noise outside of the suit than—

A grumbling growl rolled across the chamber, like something amphibious breathing in water, something like a wounded, deformed lion might make. "Hold one, Imugi," said Harmony Williams, and turned the light toward the sound.

It stood on its hands, on the wall, three feet to her right. How it could be standing on its hands?—no, it was gripping the wall, somehow—then the massive, spine-like, tail-like thing behind it lashed forward. Harmony's left arm exploded into fiery pain. The thing let go of the wall, tumbled to the floor, somehow staying upright. She tracked it on the way down, aware of movement across the room where the doors to ICU lay but intent on this thing, this particular creature, because its tail was going up and back again, the mouthful of broken and hooked teeth was bared in a wicked, hateful grin.

Once, twice, three times. The thing's body blew backward, one flailing arm blown clear of the mist of blood and spinning into a wall where, somehow, it clung briefly before twitching free. Harmony turned from the remnant's of the creature and saw another one, three or four times as big, waddling toward her. Its body joggled from side to side with each stride, an enormous potbelly swinging below, a pockmarked, tumescent thing that most certainly did not hold intestines. But it also had bony blades for arms. Up came the shotgun, harder to hold on track with only one hand, but possible, and she squeezed—

It was like blowing up a hornet's nest. Little _things_ went flying everywhere, each screeching with its own tiny voice. Six or eight of them got blown, somehow, towards her. Three latched onto her armor. One—it looked like a deformed hand with only two fingers and no nails—grabbed the front of her helmet with one finger and began tap-tap-tapping on it while the others seized hold of an ankle and a leg and began to dig in.

She would have laughed, had she not then realized that however small they were, they were hideously strong. The thing on her visor tore away its own flesh with its force, revealing two small, sharp nubs of bone which it scratched at her helmet visor—and with every blow, marked it. The ones on her limbs seized holes with two fingers and began to worm inward, heedless of their own damage as they began to depress the battle steel which formed her suit.

Harmony dropped to the floor, trying to fling them off, aware that there were twenty or thirty around her, and snatched a grenade off of her harness. She yanked out its pin, dropped it, came out of the roll, and dove for the door out of the ER.

She'd grabbed right. As she went out of sight to one side of the door the grenade blew in a cloud of silvery dust that, in a hundredth of a second, went up in an instantaneous flash and a burst of intense heat something akin to burning magnesium. It caused almost no overpressure, but Harmony was more concerned with grabbing the thing working its way through her visor, stomping on it, grabbing the thing that had reached the interior padding layer of her right calf, stomping on _it_, then grabbing the one on her right ankle and squeezing it so hard it cracked and crunched and went limp.

Outside she heard skittering and flolloping. She hit the door close. Nothing happened. Irritated, in pain, Harmony pulled the pin on another grenade and lobbed, it, underhand, through the doorway.

This one went with a roar that seemed to shake the entire room A dense cloud of smoke billowed out of the ER, but Harmony was already moving, feeling a grinding in her ankle that promised a limp soon, but for now, moving out and up and down the ramping corridors outside of the medical bay itself. Her flashlight danced against the walls, floor, ceiling in a dizzying series of flashes. She was working off of adrenaline. Out, through another multi-doored room, toward the holo sign which read "Tram station", ignoring the other doors unless they held threats.

She emerged into a clean, well-lighted place. Clean, except for blood stains spotting the floor everywhere. A covered shelter—an honest-to-god covered shelter sat on the station platform. Advertisements glowed at her from inside it. There was one tram car already there. She stepped inside, check left, check right, then slid the seldom-used door shut, sealing out the world.

She chinned her com. "Go ahead, Imugi."

He'd been waiting, patiently. _"Nelson has changed rendezvous. We'll be at the engineering tram station. She says she's got confirmed that Denell is alive too, but only one contact."_

Four of them. Hopefully. Four of the eleven who'd arrived just an hour ago. "Copy that, Imugi. Harmony out."

Harmony Williams sank down on one of the cushioned seat, laid her shotgun beside her, and as the tram began to move, considered the hole, two fingers wide, a creature's tail had torn in the biceps of her armor, and the blood leaking out of it.

((A))

_"Tram now arriving at medical deck station. Enjoy your stay._"

Three combined beams of light, dazzling in their intensity, bloomed in the coolness of the tram station. They swept left, then right, and the tread of heavy metal engineer's boots sounded as an armored figure stepped out of the tram and crossed to the entrance to Medical.

((A))

AN: Yes, more Harmony Williams. Fear not, Isaac will return next chapter. I really hope I can get it out faster than this—it really is ridiculous—but I guess that's the consequences of trying to write a tale the way I am.

But here's a request for all who care: I would like to hear what you think is going to happen next. _I_ know, but that's one of the things I like most about writing, hearing what might have otherwise happened. So drop me a comment, if you will.

Reviews: **Stormsworder**, I don't know why but it's actually a lot easier for me to write in first person—except I keep switching back to third without realizing it. Very irritating. As for the jargon…do you actually think I have any clue of how computer codes work? I believe the term is verisimilitude. Good luck on your fic.

To all the others, let me know what you think. Shout, if you will. Or vomit…or cry…whichever. I'll go off and sleep somewhere.

On another thought, if you find any inconsistencies in this storyline within itself, let me know! I _hate_ inconsistencies.

K. Stramin

14/1/2010

(12:27A.M.)


	7. Uncommon Protocols

7

Uncommon Protocols

_"Permanent physical damage" is a falsity._

_ All things, given time, can repair._

((A))_  
_

I'm floating in space, while everything else moves. The clarity of vacuum—which lacks anything and everything to obstruct view—is something no one raised on a planet can truly appreciate. Things do not diminish with distance the same way they do on a planet. They remain clear, clearer than anything, until they are far enough away your eyes physically cannot focus on them.

_Harmina _drifts behind me, ten or so kilometers back, just hanging there all sealed up, with Kendra in her coma. The ship is almost lost among the stars, a tiny white blip against nothing.

The planet Aegis VII lies below me and to my left, tens of thousands of kilometers away. This entire hemisphere is obscured by roiling clouds, except over the dig site, where a piece of rocking weighing a measurable percentage of the planet itself hit from high orbit. There the planet has formed a baleful orange eye.

I've no idea what sort of damage a planet cork would actually do. Certainly it would kill everyone on the surface, but as to the long-term effects on its structure, I've not a clue. The cork certainly cracked the planet's crust when it came out, and it fell right back in the hole. The eye of god, it seems, is probably more the molten heart of the planet—or the residual energy of the strike, or something.

Someone has probably seen something like this before, could explain it to me in more detail. But right now, I'm more concerned with steering the damnable little jet workhorse.

The _Harmina_ had two of them onboard, buried back with all the other junk. They're standard use for starship repairs—not for carrying tools and things, but for speed. A ship like the _Ishimura_ is more than a kilometer long.

Right now I'm crossing the void with it. Ahead lies the great dark bulk of the ship of hell.

((A))

No further communications from the _Ukiyo_. The _Harmina's_ cameras aren't that good, but any ship that identified itself as a repair shuttle would be broadcasting an IFF beacon, for simple safety—it would prevent the _Ishimura_'s ADS from blowing it away, for example. I didn't see a thing in the twenty thousand kilometers surrounding the ship.

Which means they're probably all dead. They sure as hell didn't come onboard, grunt at all the mess, and start fixing it up.

I check the minicomp built between the workhorse's handlebars. Estimated distance: eighteen kilometers. Estimated time to arrival: twenty minutes.

A long time in the cold dark. I've spent longer, but not on a one-man scooter in the middle of nowhere. Part of me prays that the work crew assigned to the _Harmina_ at least kept these things up to snuff, because I wasn't in a repairing mood when I left—one failure with this machine and I'm hanging here forever—or at least until I bring the _Harmina _in to pick me up, which would be a pain in the ass.

Time slides by. I replay the message from the _Ukiyo_ over and over in my head, trying to find something I missed. The logic still doesn't add up. One repair ship is it. If coms don't come back up with that, sending someone else into an unknown situation is simple stupidity.

CEC tries not to be stupid. It's not profitable. There are enough single-ship pirates and indigenous viruses through the part of the galaxy we've explored to wreak havoc. It's part of the training, even for tiered engineers, to know protocol concerning problems with ships communications. Thirty-five years ago, a single ship ambushed _USG_ _Bladkof_ during a survey run near Klebsiella. Protocol was followed. After the repair ship failed to reappear and coms stayed off, CEC alerted USFLEET, and a fleet destroyer went to take a look. It had ended as well as it could have.

But this isn't a repair ship. That's another reason I'm here hanging between the stars as the system slides by. The _Harmina_ is too valuable to risk. If _Ukiyo_ had the same problem as the _Kellion_, then both of the slip in the _Ishimura_'s boat bay are now filled with wreckage. Not a good place to land a shuttle.

_Ishimura_ looms. Spiked, mauled by meteors, gray-brown against the black, she looks like some kind of ancient armored creature, badly wounded.

And here I am crawling right into its guts again. Just another confirmation of my dubious sanity. Or rather, of the dubious_ness_ of my sanity.

The bay doors are closed. To allow my RIG and suit range to access the ship's systems without _Harmina_ helping, I wait until I'm less than five hundred meters from them, ten meters off the hull and fifty forward of where the hull slopes down toward the captain's nest, to transmit.

They open silent, revealing the bay. Nudging the foot pedals which provide boost from the hydrogen cell I'm sitting on, I drift inward.

Someone fucked up. Or, probably, they just didn't realize _Ishimura_'s autodock programming was fried. The left bay holds a shuttle, about the size of what the _Kellion_ had been. It's way too far forward, virtually crushed into that corner of the launch bay. As I drift in past the doors, I can see things drifting everywhere. Bits of metal, mostly, but intermixed are other, familiar objects, divorced from their familiar forms. Someone's right leg, clad in black metal, drifts past. Nearer the shuttle I can see more bits and pieces—a torso with attached head, sans everything else.

Nothing in the corners. Overhead…something has punched out one of the main ventilation shaft screens. Strips of mottled flesh float up there. The part of the shaft I can see is streaked with blood.

Things move all around, but without conscious intent. The detritus of violence, adrift here now in the silence. I kick the jets and drift down toward the second shuttle.

_Ukiyo_. The name is blazed in white across the ship's starboard flank. Probably Japanese, a language I've never been conversant in. The front viewport has shattered, little bits of crystal sparkling all over the place up there. The crew hatch is open, and docking stairs extended. I stop the workhorse and set it to stationkeeping, then kick off.

As I hit I click on my boots, standing sideways on the shuttle's hull, peering down into the open hatch. All dark, no power. I flood it with the pulse rifle's lights. Empty, but for seats. A lot of seats.

In no gravity you can't step down into anything. I climb down through the hatch and look around. The little hairs that seem to have been growing all over me in the time I've been aboard, getting a little more sensitive every time one of the things comes after me, are all standing up, because whatever it was _Ukiyo_ wasn't just a repair ship.

It's a personnel transport. Three rows of three seats sit behind the navigator's and pilot's chairs. Each has an empty five-point harness.

Well…perhaps not all empty. The pilot and navigator are still in their seats. I just didn't notice it because they aren't all there anymore. The pilot's head is gone, probably somewhere out the viewport, whereas the navigator is smashed across his instruments, feet on the floor on one side and fingertips touching the other, his spine snapped somewhere in the middle.

Two people. Three, at least, considering the leg floating around out there. For a real repair mission there would have been at least five, which means that the two others got out of here, or that their remains are just scattered where I haven't found them yet.

Something really big totaled this ship. Something like one of those giant amalgamation creatures—except that even they wouldn't be strong enough. But it's not something that really worries me right now.

The logical thing, maybe, to do would be to call out. Except that loud noises attract the creatures…and I still don't know who else came with the shuttle. It wouldn't surprise me if the whole shuttle had been crammed with more Unitologist fanatics. Of more concern at this moment is getting out, and finding Nicole. Whatever happened here…doesn't really change that right now.

I climb back out the hatch, then up onto the walkway which, before it got smashed, led from the flight lounge to flight control. Whenever I get back here, with Nicole—I hope—I'll need to use flight control to recall the _Harmina_, at least close enough to where I can drive out to it.

But for now…I turn toward the flight lounge, and the lift leading down to the tram station.

Nothing stops me on the way. Except for the hum of internal ventilation, the ship is silent. I'm in the lift, speeding downward, before I realize this.

The voices, the echoes or whatever they were, that trailed me during my last two ventures onboard, are gone. Nothing talks inside my head. Nothing talks in the air around me.

The lift doors slide open. White light pours in. Check left, check right, check up. Nothing here, but for the everyday sounds of a ship. No screams. No whispers.

The ship's store blinks at me from a corner. Convenient, it was, to put them all over like this. And I've got to thank Kendra for one thing at least—without her expertise, reprogramming the _Ishimura_'s ship store to tap into general ship's supplies would have been a lot harder. After all, it wouldn't have been very useful trying to reload the plasma cutter with a hot roll, would it?

As I approach the store turns on, greeting me with bright colors. Then it pauses. Symbols scroll across the screen.

THIS UNIT UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME.

I blink. It's like a bad joke. I query the store for more information.

SHIP STORE SYSTEM IS NONFUNCTIONAL. SYSTEM DIAGNOSTIC DETECTS MECHANICAL FAULT BETWEEN S-106 AND S-110, CAUSE UNKNOWN. PLEASE CONTACT OR WAIT FOR A REPAIR TECHNICIAN.

I stare at the machine. It _is_ a bad joke. The single most important thing that got me this far is always being able to count on the ship's store. Now, like so many other systems, it's broke. It shouldn't be surprising, really. The store runs on automated tracks, similar to the tram system. One of the creatures, crawling around inside there, could wreak havoc and shut the whole thing down without realizing it. But without resupply I have—I check—forty three shots in this pulse charge and twenty one plasma blasts left.

If my luck holds and the creatures stay wherever they've been for the last few hours, out of the way, I won't have to need more. But I'm past trusting luck.

_"Error detected in waste processing. Failure of door seals in intersection 31A. A repair technician has been notified."_

The dispassionate voice of the _Ishimura's_ repair subsystem blares over the tram system. A moment later it continues.

_"Error in central processing. A repair technician has been notified."_

The ship is beginning to fall apart. Without constant maintenance, anything as old as the _Ishimura_, even refitted, will break down faster than a newer design. These messages—pleas, in essence, from the computers—must have been sounding for days, ever since the ship dropped into hell.

_"Power failure on the medical deck, emergency department."_

_"Unauthorized access to ADS cannon twelve." _A pause, during which my heart begins to race—someone at one of the cannons, and the _Harmina_ sitting out there defenseless. Then, _"Diagnostic indicates a programming fault. Manual shutdown of ADS cannon five has been initiated."_

A cascade, events causing other events until it all falls down. Not that it will for quite awhile—most of the _Ishimura_'s systems have redundancies built into them, but they have also been failing.

_"Good morning, crew, and welcome to another day aboard the USG Ishimura. Breakfast will be served in the mess hall in thirty minutes."_

There isn't time for this. With or without ammunition, I need to find Nicole. I turn from the store, toward the tram.

((A))

The tram car hisses to a stop at the medical deck. I step out, onto a steel floor stained with blood from countless wounded, and eventually, countless corpses. All gone, now, a fact which still doesn't make sense. A part of me would rather not know why all the bodies seem to have vanished. Just finding out about the creatures was enough excitement for me.

The world remains bright and sharp-edged, a parting gift from the amphetamines still cooking away inside of me. Those I took before will be wearing off soon, and I'll be even more tired than before. I put the thought away and move forward.

The Ishimura greets me. It's somehow chilling to hear a voice, mostly human but with an undertone the programmers have never been able to edit out, hoping that I'll enjoy my visit to the medical deck. How many other crew members, arriving with truncated limbs or other traumatic injuries, heard that same voice and wondered whether that particular programmer had been crazy?

Before, on the _Harmina_, after I'd arrived but before I took off out the airlock, I'd been hyper. Jumped up on caffeine and drugs. The time between has served to calm my thoughts, but not my nerves. A rattle from somewhere far down the tram tunnel turns me that way, the beams of the pulse rifle flaring off of polished tracks. The tunnel remains filled with mist, or fog, or the exudate of the substance growing on the walls further aft, near hydroponics. I'm sure they're still there.

The silence dies away, into a growing sound. Sibilant, increasing in intensity, I can't hear any better if I do, but the urge to cock my head and squint is more than irresistible. The mist in the tunnel quivers, then flares away from me, sucked by a sudden wind that whips along the tram tunnel, clearing the air so that I can see several hundred yards down the tracks. More mist, from elsewhere in the tunnel, whips past the medical deck station, dappling my helmet and the floor. It's almost clear, with a hint of something yellow.

The wind dies. Within thirty seconds, the mist has arisen, seemingly from the deck itself, to fill the tram tunnel again.

I turn toward the door to medical. Time to get on with it. Too much time even looking at the things on this ship is enough to get me thinking bad things.

As I step through the door, the voice of the Ishimura perks up again.

_"Shipwide tram system is now offline. Diagnostic is in progress. A repair technician has been notified. If you are in a tram car, please wait for assistance. Do not leave the tram car. Thank you for your patience."_

((A))

The corridors of a medical bay should be clean. Spotless, sparkling even, polished as much by the intensity of the doctors and nurses as by maintenance. Instead they're spotted with dried fluids. Empty sterile equipment containers, sheets, mangled gurneys litter every corridor I walk through, every room I enter.

Then I turn a corner, slowly, into ER itself, and find the room blackened. The steel floor is cratered. Everything within thirty feet is blown into the corners of the room. The light fixtures are smashed, some dangling akilter. The walls are speckled with miniscule red droplets. Cautious, but expecting, I lift the edge of my helmet. The air is too warm. Something definitely blew up here, recently.

So someone _is_ still alive from the _Ukiyo_. I sweep the corners with my lights. Splayed against one wall is the deformed remains of one of the explosive creatures, dismember, decapitated, disembowled as they all become when they explode. Dead, however, along with its brood.

Across the room, toward the door that leads to medical storage. It's locked, as it was when I first came through here. Turning my back to the wall—after checking to make sure it's a _solid_ wall—I put the cutter in my left hand and tap at my forearm keypad.

_//executive_orders/port/--_I type, then pause to squint up at the door—_12-AB10._

_ //port_control/12-ab10: _asks the _Ishimura_ computer.

//_Unlock_

The door slides open.

Despite my ineptitude with computers, the captain's codes are working out well now that there's no one to mess with the computers except for me.

Medical storage is a single hallways with several doglegs, each leading into a separate storage area. Most are locked. I have no idea which one Nicole hid in, then did…what she did.

One step at a time, sweeping the way I've come and the way I'm heading, I unlock each door down the corridor. There are five in all, including one at the end. By the third I have passed out of the dim illumination of the emergency lights in the ER and exist only in the pool of light cast by the lights I taped on my gun and myself.

I find it in the third storage room.

The others are mostly empty. In the last few days before things really fell apart, the med bay and especially the ER had been getting far more patients that it could handle. The staff basically stripped the rooms. Even the things that wouldn't normally have a purpose in an ER—urinals, for example—are all gone, probably serving some other purpose. The floors of the first two rooms are littered with spent medical tools and streaks of blood—apparently, the trauma department leaked over into storage as well.

The third room is no different, but for the far corner. What trash there is has been shoved into the corner near the door. Three gurneys virtually fill the open area of the room, but there is a narrow aisle between them. There is an area of space, perhaps five feet by five, beyond everything that is clear of junk. Lining the lefthand wall are sterile instrument packages, somehow lost or forgotten, or ignored in the chaos.

Sitting on one of the gurneys is a handheld computer. A palm-sized thing, braced against one of the instrument packages so that it faces into the room. The 2mm flexible tubule of a miniature camera extends from a port in its top.

There is no one in the room. No bodies, but no Nicole. Empty floor.

I sit down on the edge of one of the gurneys as the manic, amphetamine endurance runs out of me. Litter shifts under my feet with a soft slithering. Air pumps through fans overhead. My breathing is irregular, choppy.

There is no Nicole. The phrase runs in my head, as if on a track, at first with ponderous slowness and then with growing speed, flitting by. _She's not here, she's not here, she's not here!_

"Damn it," I say, "Damn it all to hell."

The world goes away. The last I recall is the grip of the pulse rifle slipping from my hand to clatter onto the floor. Lights spin me down into darkness.

((A))

Cool steel under my feet. Somehow, I can feel it even with my boots on. Corrugated from grip, metallic in case gravity is turned off. I stand on the righthand ramp in the launch bay, facing toward the enormous blank screen that once welcomed me and four other people aboard the _USG Ishimura_.

The ramp seems to extend away forever. The launch bay door is just a blip, there, at the edge of my vision. As I turn my head I realize I have no helmet. It fills me with terror for a moment—for hours, my helmet has been a shield, like the rest of my suit.

The shuttle bay doors are open behind me, revealing an expanse of stars, and the corner of Aegis VII, its red eyeball glaring at me as if I am some demon out of legend, or a profaning sinner.

The flight lounge doors open, way down there, and somebody steps out. I can't make out anything but that it is a person, and they are coming this way in slow, measured steps. The doors close behind the person.

Their feet make no sound on the steel. It is as if this person has no substance, no weight to cause a noise, no mass to disturb the air.

When she stops fifty yards from me, I can make out her face. I start toward her, first at a walk, then a jog, then as I cross the last fifty feet, a flat out run.

Then five feet away I stop.

It is Nicole, and yet it is not.

She's standing in front of me, clad in the same uniform I last saw her in. But this uniform is without the sweat stains, the blood, or the sense of wear hers had. It is immaculate, straight from the laundry. Perhaps it is why I have stopped so suddenly—it is fundamentally _wrong_ here, in this dirty bay. But it is not why.

I have stopped because of her expression, because of her stillness. Because she has uttered not one word, nor given me a sign that she is breathing. Because her eyes are still and cold, and there is something immaterial, essential, behind them that is missing. Call it a soul if it helps you understand, but it is not there in this creature.

Here eyes have fixed on mine and not moved since. I am almost as frozen as she. I feel vaguely as if I am confronting a statue, even though she was moving a minute ago. Somewhere in the back of my brain I remember a myth, muddled with time, about caryatids, creatures who were statues most of the time, but which, when required, could become flesh.

Somehow, through that memory comes realization, and with it an indefinable sense of dread.

Because this is not Nicole…just as it never has been. It's just that before…it had made an attempt to act like her. The veneer has gone.

I lick my suddenly dry lips as Nicole stares at me, through me, through the universe behind me, beyond.

"Who…" I begin, then cough.

"Who…are you?"

When she speaks, only her mouth moves. Like the rest of her, it is her voice, yet it is not. Cold, reduced to its essence, without her warmth, or her life.

"You already have that answer."

I take a breath, not realizing I've been holding it. "Then…why are you here?"

"Primarily, to speak with you."

There are tones in her voice, variances. It is her, _Nicole_, no computerized overtones, no mechanistic edges mar her voice, other than that awful emptiness.

"I thought you were destroyed."

The thing wearing Nicole's form does not blink, as any human would when confronted with that strange of a question.

"Permanent physical damage is a falsity. All things, given time, can repair, assuming the basic structure remains intact or is backed up."

My paralysis has lessened. I step back, though another meter does not reduce the force of its penetrating stare. _Think, Isaac._

"What do you mean, speak to me?"

"Previous attempts using subconscious conjugation have proved unsuccessful. This is a more direct method to communicate intent."

"Wait…what? What's subconscious conjugation?"

Nicole regards me with empty gray eyes. "You lack the necessary foreknowledge. It would not enhance your ability to understand to provide you with information you cannot comprehend."

A tickle of recognition sparks in me. This is amazingly similar to the first day of my second year of engineering college, when a tier 3 engineer spoke before the entire class and ended by saying, "I know you won't get any of this. You just can't, not yet." He'd had a certain air of smugness. This thing is just stating a fact.

"Then…what are you here to do?"

"Provide you with information. Assess your capabilities regarding further manipulation of the situation."

Stated so baldly, it takes me a minute to understand. "I'm not doing _anything_ for you."

"It is possible. But you do need information."

"Why would I give a shit what you have?"

"Because it will enhance your probability of physical survival."

"How?"

"Haste would assist," says Nicole. "We can speak for two minutes and fifteen seconds more before a necessary heat overload shutdown will occur."

"Then what is it you're telling me?"

"We were not destroyed. Neither was the other. But the seismic shock of the…" the Nicole pauses for a split second, searching for a word, "Cork striking Aegis did disrupt all communications. In the absence of communications disparate parts became sentient. Even with the restoration of communications that sentience will persist. It becomes a quandary we cannot simultaneously cope with."

I shake my head, both in disgust and wonder at its phraseology. "I don't understand you."

"You will. But you will not forget what we have spoken. When power allows, we will speak again."

"I hope to hell you don't," I say—to nothing at all. The launch bay is empty, but for me.

((A))

Something is crunching nearby. Shattered glass, as if under a boot. My boot. But I'm not standing up.

I open my eyes. The room has turned sideways because my head is against the floor. Through this canted view I watch with vague disinterest as a white, pulpy shape waddles down the corridor outside the medical storage room. One of those bulging bags of fingerlings, ignorant that I'm in here, lying on the ground. I think it's the first time one of them has failed to notice me.

I wait until the sound of its feet has died away, then sit up. As I shift the gurney shakes and Nicole's personal computer falls off, bounces off my arm, and hits the floor next to a plastic syringe.

I pick up the computer. It's gone into low power mode. I fold up the camera and tuck it into one of the pockets on my belt. Then, pausing, I peer down at the syringe on the floor. It's in the clear area, where Nicole killed herself.

She's probably dead. She died here, poisoned herself with something, then the bacterium came along and infested her, and now she's shambling around out there, off with all the other creatures on their mystery island ball.

I fainted. I _must_ have fainted. I sure as hell didn't fall asleep. My chronometer shows it's been less than ten minutes since I entered this room. I found nothing, and went out like a light.

And had the weirdest damned dream. If it _was_ a dream. I'd like to believe it was, but somehow I doubt it. No dream I've ever had has left me with a pounding headache. I find that out as I bend down to pick up the syringe—a bolt of lightning hits my temple and streaks down my neck. I straighten up with a gasp.

The syringe is one of those prepackaged jobs, the ones that IV painkillers and potentially dangerous-to-combine drugs come in. Stenciled on its label is _Insumax, 100U. _I've no idea what it's for…

But sitting where it was, it's probably what Nicole used to kill herself. The needle has automatically retracted. I shove it into my belt as well.

There's a clatter out in the hallway. A rhythmic banging, clanging, growing stronger and louder. I pick up the pulse rifle and poke my head around the corridor. The noise is coming from medical storage 5, at the end of the corridor and out of sight from here.

There's a shattering crash at the end of the corridor. Immediately the _Ishimura_'s computer announces, _"Door malfunction on the medical deck, medical storage, area 12._ _A repair technician has been notified_._"_

The battered, dented door of Medical Storage 5 explodes into the corridor, rebounding off the far wall with enough force to spin it toward me. There's little enough time to think, but staying in this room, two doors away from whatever blew the door off, isn't an option—it's a deathtrap here. Gripping the frame with one hand I propel myself out into the corridor and run back toward the emergency department.

Behind me I hear an end-of-the-world bellow characteristic of only one of the creatures aboard—the tank-like brutes. One of the things that had killed Hammond. I don't turn around to find out if I'm right, it doesn't matter. The door to the emergency department swishes open and I stumble out.

Into a trap. As I emerge the ventilation duct directly above the opposite entrance—the door back to the tram station—ruptures outward. The tip of a massive fleshy tentacle protrudes, except that this tentacle is tipped by a half-rotted, half transformed head. One eye is grown shut, the other seems lit from within with the hideous radiance characteristic of these creatures. It is shriveled and dark. Upside down, the head rotates to look at me. New tendons stretch in the neck that connects it to the rest of the tentacle. It opens its mouth and screams.

Another ventilation duct ruptures, off to one side. A dozen or so many-legged things fall out of it, landing with muffled squeaks on the floor. I have not stopped running. As I close with the tentacle I raise the pulse rifle and fire ten or so shots into the head at its end. The head blows apart and I pass through the rancid mist, maybe half a second before the tentacle jerks upward, then slams into the deck with enough force to dent the steel. I'm through the door, rebounding off the far side of the waiting room without losing momentum and going off down the corridor.

Behind me the brute hits the tentacle that's blocking the door with a hellacious meaty impact. I hope it kills them both.

Then I turn a corner and run straight into another tentacle, just lying across the corridor as if waiting for me. I stumble over it before I realize that it runs in from a hole in a wall and out through another hole in the opposite wall. It shivers and begins to retract, bringing its far end from whatever it was doing elsewhere to figure out what just hit it. It's not worth a round. I keep running.

I come out into the atrium for medical and sprint toward the tram station door. Behind me the door that was just closing comes out of its frame on the end of the pursuing tentacle. Unlike all the others before—the ones that, even though they eventually intended to kill me, at least started gently—this thing acts like a battering ram, punching straight across the room. It can't see me—where are its _eyes_?—but as I reach the door and it cycles open something that feels like a tram car hits me in the back. I fly forward, several feet off the ground, watching the sharp corner of the turn into the tram station coming up.

I hit at an angle and spin, one leg off to one side, the other over my head. I hit the top edge of the tram car and skid across it. Scrabbling for a handhold—why, I'm not sure—I fail, and slide off the other side of the car. The blank exterior of the car sweeps past me for a moment, then I land on my head in the tram tunnel. Several of the lights taped to my body have come off. One has landed directly in front of me—even as my faceplate polarizes, all I can see is a brilliant glare.

((A))

Another hissing wind swept through the tram tunnels of the _Ishimura_, clearing the mist once again, though it would seep back from the bits and pieces of tissue that still labored to convert the atmosphere to one more favorable to them. On the heels of the wind came a second, longer rush, this time running the opposite way down the tram tunnel, again filling the tunnel with vapor. The engineer's body lay in the center of the tram floor, now covered by a hugging cloud. His helmet filters clicked into place, giving him air that smelled only slightly of byproducts and methane.

With measured tread, an armored figure came down the tunnel, keeping to one side, blending with the darkened wall. Then it paused, as if in contemplation, and made its way toward the huddled form in the middle of the tram floor.

((A))

A/N: Yes, definitely too long between updates. I can apologize…but I can't promise they'll be any faster. The second semester of nursing school is certainly more complex than I gave it credit for. Go ahead and gripe as much as you want…just know it probably won't change things.

What I _would_ find interesting about this chapter would be your specific emotions. Obviously I know what emotions the story is _supposed_ to engender…but not those that it does. So if something about this chapter strikes you as particularly interesting, drop me a line.

If you get confused out of your head, drop me a line about that. I'm sure somebody will be.

Thank you for your comments on your expectations, though some of them were a little more basic than I expected…I guess that is also to be expected.

Angel Commando, I _still_ don't get how Isaac is badass, but that's me. And I'll just laugh out loud about "Psh, I know what's going to happen." I think good fiction ran out of such cheap plots a long time ago.

I hate the spasm of doom. I hate every single way in which Isaac dies. Oh well. That might be part of why I'm writing this.

I still hate the game…good lord, what a bunch of paradoxes.

K. Stramin

1030p.m.


End file.
